Macalua.com

Matt Cutts (aka GoogleGuy) has indicated at a new search personalization option for Google. While this is primarily being packaged as a personalization tool, you can bet that this or a variant will be factored in the Google algorithm in the not so distant future.

You can now tag SERP items with a “Remove result” flag which will give the searcher three new options:

• to remove the tagged page for a specific search.
• to remove the tagged page for all searches.
• to remove all pages from the tagged domain for all searches.

From Search Engine Journal:

The remove results option to report spam to Google is a pretty big step for the search engine as is the remove results from personalized search option and is quite similar to the spam flagging they’re using on Blogger to report spam blogs (splogs). Be sure that Google will be paying close attention to the sites which are reported via the form and the sites which are simply “removed.”

To emphasize the point, the “remove results” option is only in Google personalized search and will only remove the results from that specific user’s results, not all Google results. Yahoo has a similar function with their My Web search via its “Block” option.

I think this is a step forward as far manual qualitative reviews go, but on whether it will succeed in cleansing the SERPs of spam, that remains to be seen. I also don’t like the fact that this system will be prone to abuse (see Yahoo and Blogger).