Google's voting button

I recently installed the new google toolbar on MSIE, been using Firefox, to see what features it has. One of the features I noticed was a voting button. See attached image.

I was wondering, if users vote yes, would it help the site's rankings in any ways? Would it harm it if a competitor votes no?

Currently those are not know to help your rankings in any way. However, Google does not reveal it's secrets to anyone so who knows... If it did though, it could be very easily abused!

I'm sure google would be able to stop abuse quite easily, all they'd have to do is match ip to if you've voted or not, or better still maybe each toolbar has a unique id built in, so they could tell if you've voted that way as well.

One would assume that those voting buttons as you called
them are probably to help google understand if they are
sending you pages that are relevant to your searches or not,
and not for the sites rankings.

but, as stated earlier, who knows...

Actually I think is both. This is Googles explination on the button:

Voting Buttons - Use these buttons to vote for or against a page or search result. Click the happy or unhappy face to tell Google that you like or dislike a particular page. You can also use these buttons to report especially good or bad results after you do a search with Google.

I expect that Google does take some notice of these buttons, but who can only guess how. Google likes to keep its secrets a dark art. However I dont believe they would put the buttons there unless they were using the results in some way.

I suspect the votes get used to accumulate black marks againsts sites with auto-diallers, or for sites that are attempting to spam the SERPs by using auto-generated text, thousands of sub-domains etc. Once bad-votes reach a threshold Google could manually check the site and remove it if neccessary. I doubt they use it in any automatic algorithm as that would be too open to abuse.

yep. maybe google uses this to catch bad boys !! not for rank sites .but as everyone says who knows its google !!!

Yeah I can see the negative votes worth something but it can also be abused by competitors. I don't think Google would go and check each vote manually, there will be way too many. Maybe they'll check the ones with the most votes.

Yeah those buttons can not be a reliable source for voting as it can be manipulated, let the backlinks do this job.

Seems strange they still have them on the Toolbar if they are not using them. Perhaps its a power to the people thing - and some guys just like to be asked what they think of a site!