"Sidewiki"A new commenting tool by Google..

Tweet Pin It Google unveiled a new tool "Sidewiki" on September 23 which allows notes and comments to be posted alongside Web pages for others to read.


The tool is very easy to use and can be used by anyone to express their opinion about the content of web pages. They would now even be able to suggest links to other resources available online or can even provide them with other information they have about a web page. Google has officially announced this update. It has been mentioned that Sidewiki would use a special algorithm to categories the comments based on their quality and that it would rank accordingly.
In Google’s official blog Mr. Michal Cierniak, engineering lead for Sidewiki and Mr. Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management have written as follows, “[The algorithm] takes into account feedback from you and other users, previous entries made by the same author and many other signals we developed,”.

With Sidewiki, users would even be able to have video clips. The text comments that they post about the web pages can be about the whole web page or just about a segment of the web page. The user would even be able to publish their comments to their Twitter, blogger accounts and Facebook right from their Sidewiki interface.

Users would also have the option vote for other comments. They would be able to select a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ specifying whether they found a particular comment to be useful or not. This would be much simpler a task as the users browsing a particular web page would be able to view other comments as well as Sidewiki would automatically import comments that are posted by others for that particular web page. Google has said that it would eventually be making Sidewiki available in its Chrome browser as well. Google is also in the process of developing a Sidewiki API that users would be able to use as an external API that can be integrated into their own applications for performing the same task.

Google is also offering something similar called the SearchWiki. This would also have some similar features that can be used by people who search using its search engine and log in to their Google accounts. SearchWiki would as well allow users to up or down the search results and would be able to attach or remove comments to the results. Both these features would be of great use to the users as this would benefit not only the user but would also help other users in knowing something more about a particular web page. In fact, it would certainly develop the quality of the web pages that we would be able to see hereafter, as the webmasters as well would be more cautious in updating their web pages, as users would not be free to comment on the quality of the web pages as well.