To be perfectly honest, I've been pretty critical of Google in the majority of posts I've written here over the last two years - but this one post I'm going to write about today is 180 degrees different.

First of all, Google's new, "experimental" "Digg like" Search Interface is not only the future of Search, it's also a lot of fun and a 100 times more interesting, in my opinion, than anything else they've come up with in the last 4 years.  The new search interface is also a "logical" evolution of Social Media, Social Networks and Search Technology and what I've seen in the movie below is almost exactly the vision I have for the Future of Search - and it can't come fast enough because the search of today, on Google, or any other Search Engine, sucks compared to what it could and someday, will be.

TechCrunch's post by Michael Arrington Is This The Future Of Search? has the most detail, yet, of this fairly new development in Search - that has just hit the blogosphere over the last day or so.

What excites me is not, so much, the "Digg" part, which is probably going to end up being "gamed" by "Google gangs" just like "Digg Gangs" did/do now - though it's still an improvement over what we have now, and this new "Digg like voting" is much more "democratic" than Google's current Search Engine which gives all the power of ranking and determining what gets into the search results to the computer engineers and scientists who program the search engine.

What excites me is the "FriendFeed/Twitter" part of this new Search Interface and ranking system, which allows the wisdom of Searchers to mix in, rate, and comment on the Search Results - this is truly the future of search - and it allows the users the control and transparency that Google and the other Search Engines have deliberately withheld. 

But now, all the Search Results, in all the Search Engines, are so lousy, overall, that even Google, spending all it's time now patching up it's failed Pagerank system, it's failed back link, it's failed spam filtering, and everything else that has evolved, finally, is ready, to share control of the search results with the users of it's search engine.

We're not talking about some dials - the stuff they gave us a few years ago (both Google and Yahoo had versions of this feature), we're talking about Personalized and Social Search merged in one interface that will allow anyone to see comments on the Search Results (and I guess, Google will study those comments and re-rank the results - using their "semantic" technology - perhaps the right place for automation, at this point - since there's going to be so much commentary on the search results, no army of humans could possibly  read it all in time to act on it - before a ton more comments are made.

In my follow up post on The Analytics Guru -

Future of Search Engine Optimization - Google’s New Search Interface

I'll envision the future of Search Engine Optimization once the new Search Interface is fully rolled out, probably anytime between the 18 months from now, and five years (it'll depend on how "aggressive" Google wants to be here - setting this new interface as a Google Experiment is OK for now, but to get the full interaction, at some point, they will need to take the plunge and make this new innovation, the default interface for Google Search - the sooner the better, in my book).