I hope it is not the future of search. There should be a better way, learning from users actions instead of querying them directly.

In fact I think Google already has these ways, with Google Toolbar, Google Analytics and Adwords tracking users behaviours among other things.

So I suspect, if this voting stuff comes, it would be more psychological than technical? Maybe people are happier with a site if they are allowed to "vent".

A bit like the escalator engineers who placed mirrors next to the escalators so that people would not notice the waiting time so much. It doesn't improve the technology, but makes people happier.

Well it is good to know that Google is experimenting with Social Search in this way.

I am very enthusiastic about Social search and even built one (with the same commenting, voting features).

Wikia is doing the same, so, nothing new about this for people like me, but, feels great to know that Google is atleast 'experimenting' with social search.

do you think the voting should affect the results?

yeah, sure, otherwise why display that feature?

This could be quite awesome. Only thing is, I have a hunch the comments will be of Youtube quality.

The only thing that worries me about the voting functionality is how this will work in regards to SEO - specifically people spamming with votes for less relevant search results in their various niches. I have no doubt that this kind of voting will work for broad terms, but would be less valuable in very specific keyword phrases which only get few searches.

What would be fantastic is if Google could weight these votes based on how "alike" the person voting for it is to me.

EG, if I was interested in say, Kung Fu and Knitting, and there were other people interested in Kung Fu and Knitting, then the options that they vote for would be more relevant to me than someone who was doing SEO work on those various sites. So hopefully those would rank higher.

In the video, he shows that comments too can be voted up and down (not just search results), so bad comments will quite quickly disappear.

Comments should be from your friends, like friend feed.

I know its been talked about with several threads already, but this is the first post that has a video of it in action.

So for the many people who are not able to use the new search feature (like me) - this is a great help to visualise where Google is trying to take it.

could this possibly be a joke?