Wrong on one point, though. Given that I focus mainly on paid search, I don’t “know how to benefit and manipulate [organic] Google up to this point,” in the sense that I am no garden-variety SEO. My comment would take a lot longer to break down, but it’s safest to say that my feeling about the new Wikified search interface is similar to my feeling about some ongoing changes in the AdWords back end. Beautiful elegance in design can give way to feature-itis. I want to be a “regular” user of search, and I think that the majority of users also do.

I have been a longtime advocate of a truly powerful Google Search which would allow you to bake your own algorithm. What I see Google doing here is tipping its cap to some fads in community annotation and customization — while not offering anything genuinely powerful enough to satisfy power users. It’s not a particularly new idea to allow people to scribble comments on something (remember back to an app called “Third Voice?” or how about the nonstarter idea of Alexa/Amazon being used to offer a tiny handful of people the opportunity to write a review about a whole website) or to customize a result… it’s not a feature set I’ll personally use and yes, insofar as it could be gamed, it just opens up another hole for “optimizers” (similar to the Digg gaming, I don’t play).

Back to the issue of search visibility and people skilled at manipulation being accustomed to gaming Google. We should all know at this point that serious enterprise level SEO for grownups involves a range of strategies that break down into many categories, many of them coming back to info architecture, content quality, reputation, etc. Working on these matters is complex and involves real world strategy. When my clients do ask for SEO, we work with them on complex, real world strategy. So I would hardly consider this latest wrinkle in non-uniform, custom search results as letting the air out of my “SEO manipulating balloon.” But I do think of it as contributing to a messy reality layered on top of an already imperfect, messy search product. My intent would never to be to fear messy reality carte blanche (I would say I am not being reactionary), but rather to point out that the breathless triumphalism about the ability for folks to jot notes and mete out responses (the hoped-for wisdom of the crowd) needs to be tempered by the reality that you can make a royal cock-up (thanks to our British friends for the terminology) of democracy when it tilts into cartoonish demagoguery. If you think a bunch of junky, useless, manipulative, and otherwise unhelpful comments and noise can’t build up and ruin a Google property, you have only to look at the user commentary in places like Google Finance, Google Video of a few years ago, or Youtube today. Google Finance has always sported comments less useful, more idiotic, and often more manipulative than we saw on Motley Fool, Raging Bull, Yahoo Finance, and Silicon Investor 10+ years ago. On Google Video of a few years ago, not only were comments juvenile, but people were manipulating, spamming, and potty-mouthing the tagging function. Now, we’re set to unleash this on the entire search interface? Yikes.

So that’s the thrust of my concern. I wonder if this time will be different. And wonder why Google thinks or hopes it will be.