Looking to adjust its searches towards personalized results, Google announced yesterday that it has begun testing a new feature called Preffered Sites, which will register the preferences of its users. The visitors will be able to tell Google which are the pages they trust the most and that they expect to appear in their search results.

The company’s officials explained: ”The preferred sites feature lets you set your Google Web Search preferences so that your search results match your unique tastes and needs. Fill in the sites you rely on the most, and results from your preferred sites will show up more often when they're relevant to your search query.”  

If the feature will pass the testing period and go live for everyone, it is expected to have a significant impact on people’s searches. Preffered Sites is considered an extension of Google SearchWiki, a service that allows users to elevate, add, delete and also annotate their search results.  The Preffered sites feature is active only if the users are logged in through their Google accounts. The preffered Web sites and search results are private.

From the bottom of Google’s preferences page, once logged in, users can edit their preffered sites by checking the link next to the search box on Google.com. The search engine accesses the user’s search history and also other information from the Google account in order to make suggestions on the things that could also be included; users can either choose from the suggestions or enter the URLs of other pages. In order to keep all the changes, users must save their preferences.