Google's Comment, Promote, Remove--Just more search preferences, or a new way to affect rankings?

Google has a couple of new features that appear whenever you perform a search: Comment, Promote, and Remove. They appear as little buttons that appear after each result.


What do these do? The comment button obviously lets you write a few little comments under each result. The Promote button shoots your site up to the #1 spot, but don't get your hopes up--at least, not yet. It'll only appear like that for you. Same with the Remove button--it removes a site from your SERPs. It seems that these buttons are just extensions of the existing search options.

Or is it? What if Google actually collects this data and counts how many people promoted or removed your site?

What does this mean for SEO? Assuming the above were true, then it's as if Google is becoming a Digg of sorts, which is a double-edged sword. It's good because there's even more human input than before when it comes to SEO. It's bad because all the link building and other 'traditional' SEO techniques everyone's been using will become worthless, and any other future efforts.

Whatever the case, I'm fairly certain that it will at least play a role in SEO in the future.