Improvements to Google Co-Op Coming Soon

SES Conference, San Jose — A Googler said that the company would be making several incremental improvements in Google’s social search platform in the coming weeks.

Shashi Seth, product lead search, said that Google Co-Op would offer tools that allow you to see how your Co-Op contributions are performing, and who the top contributors are.

“Look for it in the next few weeks,” Seth said.

Co-Op is Google’s social search product that allows users to contribute topical expertise by labeling pages. Those pages are revealed and credited to the author when a user refines a search through Co-Op.

“Google Co-Op is still very much in beta and we’re still learning more about it,” Seth said. “We’re treading carefully.”

Asked if the Co-Op platform could be extended to other Google products, Seth said that Co-Op currently powers Google Accessible search, and that future applications of the platform could include areas such as news.

“We want to make sure it does work before applying it anywhere else. But if it does work, absolutely, [news] is a direction to go in. It’s definitely something that’s been brought up several times before.”