During the day today, I noticed several very odd changes to different search queries. The first time I searched on our company name I got our <title> and our <meta description> as the search result. The next time I searched, the title of the search result was just the company name (without the full title) and the description was our standard meta description.

Then I did another search, and the title was again just the company name, but the description was the ODP description.

Next, I searched on a product offering where we are in position 1 - and the result title was just the company name, and title was the ODP title. I could understand why they would use the company name for a result when the search phrase was the company name, but why use it when searching on a specific product phrase?

Definitely going to launch the NOODP meta tag – but I wonder about the page title… And I wonder why the flip flop several times in the same day?

Google seems to have just launched new functionality for people who are logged into their accounts – you can “promote” or “demote” specific natural search results with a click – and you can even comment on different search results! Comments seem to be “public” comments – I have only seen a couple of examples where there are comments from others – maybe Google is rolling out the public part of commenting slowly – since it isn’t in my account yet.

Question – does this informal “voting” for sites have an affect on natural search results seen by people who are NOT logged into their accounts? Does this commenting show up? If so, Google will need to consider that there are a lot of people who will quickly figure out how to game this system… User generated content (UGC) cuts both ways – and adding it into the search algorithm, even if it is minor, could have a significant affect on the way that natural search results are accessed and optimized for. According to an interview in the Wall Street Journal, Google will not “initially” base search results on voting or comments – however with all of that great data at their disposal, will it not be really tempting to have it influence ranking to some degree?

Interesting addition – but I am really concerned about whether people will “game” this system (seems like the Black Hat Killer App!).

Here is a screen capture of how the votes and comments appear when you are signed into your Google account.