Before you go out and start clicking the up button on your website and the down button on all your competitors websites, this only works for your search results and you need to be logged into your Google account for this to show up and work.

What is SearchWiki?
Here's what Google said in their Official Google Blog:-

SearchWiki is a way for you to customize search by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. With just a single click you can move the results you like to the top or add a new site. You can also write notes attached to a particular site and remove results that you don't feel belong. These modifications will be shown to you every time you do the same search in the future. SearchWiki is available to signed-in Google users. We store your changes in your Google Account. If you are wondering if you are signed in, you can always check by noting if your username appears in the upper right-hand side of the page.

You can also check out this video about this feature.

Will SearchWiki affect my rankings?
This is an interesting question as I think directly no, but indirectly yes. Let me explain...

If you log into your Google account and start clicking around and personalising your search results I don't believe this will affect the rankings of websites. It would be silly for Google to allow this as this would be very easily manipulated and the chances of someone using this feature to benefit themselves or their income are very high. So the chances of Google directly incorporating user data from the SearchWiki feature into their algorithim and therefore their search results would be very slim.

But what about on a large scale?
Even if hundreds and thousands of users all click a website up the results to number one, I still don't think this is going to impact rankings directly. It would be pretty easy for a script kiddy to come up with a program that created a few thousand Google accounts then logs in and clicks up certain websites. Again this would be an easily exploitable system without heavy moderation.

So... what will they use the data for?
I think that Google bought this feature out for two reasons:-

1. To create another feature to ensure users continue to use their search engine; and
2. Gather user data to find out more information about search behaviour and how user generated search results may be incorporated into one of their future services.

If you think about it, Google has a history of giving away features that allow them to gather a large amount of information:-

• Google Analytics
• Google Adwords
• Google Local Business Centre
• Click Tracking across all of its services
• Personalised search
• Google Toolbar
• Google Checkout
• Gmail
• YouTube
• Google Health
• Webmaster Tools
• Google Chrome

If you look at this long list of products that are mostly free you will start to see that this is just another service by Google that will help them gather more user data to improve their services and move their revenue strategies forward. At the end of the day SearchWiki is a small piece of the overall search pie that people use each and every day so to think that this will directly impact on rankings seems a little off the mark.