You and Will are close to each other in my Google Reader, and I forgot for a second who I was quoting. I edited the post pretty quickly after publishing it, but I guess you caught the mistake… =)

I haven’t used SearchWiki very much in the past few weeks (although I have tagged a couple items for easy retrieval). I hadn’t considered your point about getting blinders, and I suppose that is one of the drawbacks of incorporating the bookmarking directly into the search results.

Google might have gotten a better reception if they implemented the system so that it stored the notes (in the “See all my Searchwiki notes” section) but didn’t alter the search results. All they’d have to do is add a third button (a plus sign?) to save a result.

Regardless of whether Google decides to use individual’s ratings to affect the main search results, by putting on “blinders” while logged into Google, you might seriously hinder your own searching. Granted I know this is probably a circumstance not likely to happen, but if I want a more targeted search, I’m going to use a university database or some other targeted database of information. I want Google for what it became famous for; searching the largest swath of the web it can.

Maybe it’s just a general fear of change that I’m experiencing…time will tell.