Annotating web pages is not new. Over the years, numerous companies have offered the services to do so. None of them actually left a mark, simply because it was too much a server load to handle. But Google with its huge resources and arrays of server, would be an interesting player.
The idea is simple, to give users a place to share their views about the page that they just skimmed through and to add certain information if not present, next to any webpage.Google Sidewiki appears as a browser sidebar, where you can read and write entries along the side of the page.
Sidewiki has been launched as a special version of Google Toolbar for both IE and Mozilla. For other browsers its yet to be launched. When installed the toolbar opens a sidebar if any information about the web pages are available which have earlier been left by some other user. Google sorts out the best result in accordance with relevance. The sorting algorithm finds out information not just about the webpage we are going through but even according to the content of the web page. Lets say we have some famous quote from some famous personality. If someone comments on that particular quote it will show it as relevant result in any webpage it occurs.
The real catch is Google’s self designed method to sort out the most relevant result. It ranks Sidewiki entries using an algorithm that promotes the most useful and high quality entries. It takes into account the feedback from the users on the entries made by the author and some other signals. It then mines the data extracted from the these entries sing a scalable infrastructure called ‘Pregel’ (read more).
Till now the response has been good and is catching up fast. There has been some worries about the spam and entries showing non-relevant results. But overall if this things goes to full scale, combined with the information available on the webpage it simply can be a huge encyclopedia of knowledge and experience added. Moreover it will enhance the searching techniques. Google might just start Sidewiki discussions for particular search query or it can just include the relevant Sidewiki entries along with the forum or blog results available.
Another very important feature which Google has introduced along with this service is its API. All the Sidewiki comments and information will be available with the developers to be included in their applications and widgets.
Download Google toolbar from here.