Google just provided me with the best example yet of the diminishing return of user input I was talking about last week. The new SearchWikis are an invitation to spammers, as Michael Arrington in the US and Didier Durand in France have pointed out.

In case you weren’t convinced of the uselessness of SearchWikis:

And the real spam, on keywords that bring in cash, hasn’t even kicked in yet.

Apparently, Google has been working on SearchWiki for more than a year. In all this time, they didn’t understand that managing user input requires skills, all the more when the mass of users increases.

On the contrary, the Russian search engine Yandex did not move away from its core competency - algorithmic search. That doesn’t imply shunning users’ opinions. Yandex incorporates user input into search results very carefully. When dealing with millions of users, they know they need to fine-tune the commenting mechanism if they want contributions to remain valuable.

Framing conversation

Take comments on news stories. Google tried to get high-profile people in the news to comment on Google News, 18 months ago. The result? 44 comments in the last month, most of them just adding another expert voice to an article rather than engaging conversation.

Yandex tried another way. On top of web pages, they index news stories and blogs (just like Google). Their algorithm identifies a topic in the news and then finds bloggers posting about it. The result is a single webpage, on any issue, offering users content and conversation together.

Yandex remains the middleman between information and its usages, while Google tried to become the central point of the conversation. Thus, Google ventured in a zone where its army of computer scientists will be assailed by wild trolls and cunning spammers.

Elena Kolmanovskaya, whom I met last week in Moscow, put it clearly: “Yandex’s mission is to answer questions, not to make content. In this, discussion doesn’t help and comments are irrelevant”.

Get user input – just don’t tell them you do

Google’s SearchWiki gives more room to users’ choices. We are clearly asked for our opinion about search results. This opens the door to gaming the system in every possible way.

Yandex devised a system where users’ preferences are taken into account by the algorithm, while limiting the possibilities of gaming.

Items on the news home page are hierarchized according to the number of clicks they receive, for instance. The more clicks a story receives, the longer it stays on top.

Yandex also monitors the keywords typed in by users, looking for spikes in interest that would indicate breaking news. Then, the Yandex.news engine finds and preeminently displays stories on the hottest issue.