Most of us turn to Google when we have a question, any question. But have you ever wanted to make those search results more useable for you? People-powered search engines like ChaCha, Anoox, and Mahalo have been out for a while, attempting to provide another alternative to the Google pigeons by having ordinary people help make search results more relevant. Today, Google answered back with an experimental version of personalized search results which added simple icons to the normal search results that highlighted discoverable and intuitive new functionality. Because this is a Google experiment, it is only for select users with Google accounts for a limited time.

I stumbled on it doing one of my many daily searches for random information. I got the normal set of search results but then noticed the cool icons: up arrow, delete X, and comment bubble - instantly recognizable icons.

Reorder the Results: The arrow turns green when you hover over it and when you click on it, the entire result item moves up one space in the list. It’d be awesome if this was drag and drop like iGoogle gadgets, but the icons seem like they were the least intrusive way to add this functionality without having to completely redesign the web page.

Adding Comments: When you click on the comment bubble, a standard text box appears for your comments. Nice and clean, not too fancy. Your saved comments appear directly below the normal result information with your Google nickname and the time stamp. You can easily edit or delete your comments by clicking on the comment bubble.

Deleting Results: The best part is deleting all the results that are of no use to you. Simply click the X icon and “poof,” bye-bye result. Okay, the poof cloud is pretty much just like pulling shortcuts off the dock on a Mac, but it’s still fun. Deleter’s remorse? No problem. All the results you delete are compiled at the bottom of the page under the collapsible “Results you removed” link. Click on “Restore” for anything you want back on the list. After deleting a few items, refresh the page. Google will bring your total number of results on the page back to 10.

Adding Results: And if for some reason you can’t find the link that you know is supposed to be there, you can also go to the bottom of the page and click on the “Suggest a webpage” link to add that page.

All the changes you make to the results will be saved for you. Every time you log in, you will have access to them. You can also look to see what other people’s edited results for your search terms. At this point, it’s not clear how much of this new functionality Google will eventually roll out and how the editing will affect their actual search results, but it sure is cool to play around with.