“The preferred sites feature lets you set your Google Web Search preferences so that your search results match your unique tastes and needs,” the official help page explains. “Fill in the sites you rely on the most, and results from your preferred sites will show up more often when they’re relevant to your search query.”

Preferred Sites lets you give priority to both entire URLs and specific sections of sites. You could, say, add in www.inquisitr.com and have all the site’s stories become “preferred” within your search results — or you could add in www.inquisitr.com/category/tech and include only the site’s tech stories.

Preferred Sites is considered an experimental feature. It can be activated via the Google Preferences page when you are signed into your account.

Seems on-par with the recent SearchWiki customization tool Google unveiled back in November. Unlike SearchWiki, though, at least this one won’t clutter up your screen unless you choose to activate it.

(Via Google Operating System)

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Google has started rolling out “SearchWiki,” a new feature that allows users to change the order of search engine results.

Available only to signed in Google users, the feature allows you to move the sites that appear in rankings up or down, take them out altogether, leave notes next to specific sites and suggest new sites that are not already in the results, or are buried too far down in the results to see.

Changes are stored in a users Google Account, so are available from any computer.

In a post to the Google Blog, Google was quick to point at that the changes only affect your own searches, and have no effect on general search results. Interestingly though notes made against search results using the new feature will be available to other users by a “see all notes for this SearchWiki” link.

Video demo from Google to follow. If it looks familiar, it’s because screenshots of SearchWiki have leaked before with rumors that Google was testing a Digg or Reddit competitor. At the time of writing I’m not seeing SearchWiki yet although it is supposed to be available by now, so hang in there if you can’t see it yet.

(img: The NY Times)

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