CNET reports that Google is testing user rankings of search results. I built this into one of my search UI's back in 1999 but never ported it across the instances because of the awkwardness of window management. By the time you've seen the page, the rating widget is likely gone. One solution is a proxy, so that the rating widget can be on the target page, but that won't scale to Googlish proportions. Interestingly, the inline preview feature I recently implemented makes this a bit more likely to get good usage by enabling the rating widget to be onscreen with the to-be-rated content.
Back in my implementation, I threw in another technical ooomph by using Flash for the rating widget so that user ratings could be recorded without form submission (and page flicker). It will be interesting to see how Google folk tackle these challenges (and hopefully it won't be activeX).
11/27/2001
5:17:08 PM
I've added a inline preview function to the search results. Try it out on a search for cognitive. The view inline commands are on the lower right of each search result.