In the attempt to continuously improve their already dominant powerful search service, Google are now looking at more social approaches to the way results are displayed and utilised by browsers.

A video from Tech Crunch shows a user interface being tested, demonstrating new features Google are looking to integrate into their search including the ability to vote results up and down, as well as removing them from your own results list.

Other possible features include the ability to add comments about websites. How this would be moderated, I’m unsure. The concept sounds great, but whether a comments facility would be beneficial on a search results page remains to be seen. I personally very rarely need to try any more than the first 3/4 results to discover what I’m looking for. I don’t think I’d even consider looking at comments.

The question arises of whether this will be beneficial to the user and a valid improvement to Google’s services, or another method of gathering user information and keeping tabs on us. An ever-growing paranoia surrounding the ‘Big Brother’ concept is only spurred on by news as the above.

With social networking becoming an integral part of every day life for many people, search results kept on record, bank account details, medical information, personal pictures, documents and details held on numerous computer servers all around the world by many different companies; the threat of identity theft or personal information being leaked becomes a very worrying subject.

I don’t doubt that Google’s research and testing is solely to provide a consistently better service. However, with the amount of personal information stored with Google - it’s easy to see why some people become more and more paranoid by this.

What’s your views?