SearchWiki Breaks Numbered Google Results – Easy Fix

On 20 November 2008, Google introduced SearchWiki, allowing users to customize their search results by re-ranking, deleting, adding and commenting on them. I’m not going to cover how SearchWiki works, nor am I going to examine whether the impact of SearchWiki is positive or negative.

I was going to moan about how SearchWiki broke the Numbered Google Results script for Greasemonkey. Instead, I just worked out how to fix it. Here’s a simple hack to the Numbered Google Results script which allows it to work with SearchWiki.

SearchWiki Breaks The Numbered Google Results

The Numbered Google Results Greasemonkey script basically does what it’s title says: it numbers the results presented in Google’s Search Results. This allows you to instantly identify where a website is ranked. This is very useful for SEOs who are monitoring the progress of their websites in the SERPs.

You can see it in action in the following screenshot – note the numbers before each entry.

With the introduction of SearchWiki, the numbered results broke. Certain results, such as News results from Google, still show a number, but normal search results don’t. You can clearly see this in the following screenshot.

Solution – Hacking The Numbered Google Results Script

Thankfully, this problem can be easily solved by making a very simple hack to the script. Here are the steps (assuming you have installed the script):

1. Right-Click on the Greasemonkey icon in Firefox
2. Click Manage User Scripts and a dialog box will open
3. Select Number Google Results from the list
4. Click the Edit button (at the bottom of the dialog box)
5. If asked for the location of a text editor, find one on your hard drive (if you use Notepad, start by looking for C:\Windows\Notepad.exe)
6. Make the change shown below, then Save, Close and click Okay
7. Refresh (F5) Google to make sure the changes are loaded

Here’s the change. Find the following line (at around line 54):

if (tp.className == 'g') {

and change it to:

if (tp.className == 'g' || tp.className == 'g w0') {

I told you it was simple! You should now get numbered results whether you are logged into Google or not. SearchWiki won’t break it.

Tags: firefox extensions, google, greasemonkey, hacks, search, SERPs