Adjust Your Rankings with a Few Clicks

If you could influence or manipulate your search ranking, would you? Of course you would. That’s our main goal as search marketers. Sproose, a search engine that allows users to vote and rank the listings in their index, has just launched their voting technology for their video search.

Sproose delivers a “human popularity voting” model where each user may influence the ranking of the index creating improved search results. The more users that vote a site the further up in the ranking it moves. The same voting technology is now being applied to the Sproose video search index.

So basically, here’s how it works:

Login into Sproose and you can vote for any video, page, or result by clicking on an icon to the left. This icon will display how many other registered users have voted for that specific video or page. Users can also leave comments that will be applied to each listing to provide the Web 2.0 community with a conversation platform. Every vote a site earns will actually affect the order of the listings. That’s right, the more votes a link gets, the higher up in the rankings it appears.

Can marketers game the system?

“Sproose offers users a really creative way of having the community improve upon algorithmic search for both video content and web results,” says Bob Pack, CEO.

Technically each registered user can only vote once, but Sproose doesn’t give any specific information on how they will adjust to click fraud. Although they should be able to tell if a large number of new accounts all vote for the same pages.

Seeing that Sproose is still fairly new, even one vote can make a significant difference in the order of the listings. It will be interesting to watch the outcome of Sproose, their voting system, and whether or not they gain enough traffic to make a difference. Do you think this is a good system or are they flirting with potential spam overload?