Google Letting Users Rank Search Results

Myriad writes "C|Net News is running an article about Google testing out a new system which would let users rank pages. From the article, 'Two weeks ago, Google began quietly testing a Web page voting system that, for the first time on a large scale, could eventually let Web surfers help determine the popularity of sites ranked by the company's search engine.'" As someone who has a lot of experience with systems where users self rate content, let me just wish Google the best of luck. Especially since for many unscrupulous businesses, ratings in search engines directly translate to dollars.

Comments

Google Attack Engine

[Caball]

While on the subject of Google, there is an interesting article at The Register detailing how search terms are used to exploit servers, switches, routers, etc.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/23069.htm l

Win32

[jeriqo]

This feature is only available from the 'Googlebar'.
The problem is that this GoogleBar only plugs in Internet Explorer, so *nix geeks won't be able to rate sites..

It consists on small faces on which you click. (happy or unhappy)

-J

Re:Why not just monitor clickthroughs?

[Plutor]

Because more likely than not, this would simply reinforce many pages' positions. When I search, I (almost every time) visit at least the first couple hits, unless they're obviously inapplicable.

My only problem with the current implementation is that it's only supported in MSIE. It uses the google toolbar app. If only there were a google toolbar for Mozilla.

They aren't stupid

[90XDoubleSide]

If you read the article before you post, you will notice that Google doesn't plan to make the user opinions a large factor in their relevance equation, if it applies to individual sites at all:

Rather than using the votes to tinker with the specific rankings of particular pages or sites, he said, the feature would most likely be used to bolster the relevance of overall results.

"It will most likely have more of an aggregate impact," Krane said. "We have indexed more than 1.6 billion Web pages, so it is extremely inefficient to go after individual pages."

Also remember that this is only one of many of Google's tools to improve relevance. You can already do your part to stop spammers by reporting them to search-quality@google.com.

Another piece of the Global Brain

[loosenut]

There was an article on New Scientist about some technology similar to this. It would analyze what parts of a web page were hit the most, and bring those to the foreground (think bigger, bolder links), and shrink or kill off the unused links.

It's all part of the process of creating a more "intellegent" web.

here it goes.

[sideshow]

Ok you make a page that has all sorts of info on a subject like 1966 Mustangs. The page has everything you ever wanted to know about the car. But you secretly put something in the page, like a server-side redirect, that takes the user and sends them to a page about Cameros. So you submit the page and the search engines give a high ranking because the page has a lot of good info on Mustangs. But people that go to the page get sent to a different page that talks about something else.

Whats funny about this is that the search engines already know this. The Marketing Director at the company I work for told me that this hasn't worked in a couple of years. Some engines send a second agent out to see if the page the page at that link is the same as one that got indexed. I think this a case of whoever wrote the artice isn't up to date on search engine technology.

Googlebar for non-ie

[WPL510]

The problem is that this GoogleBar only plugs in Internet Explorer, so *nix geeks won't be able to rate sites..
Well, yes and no. There is currently a project on Mozdev that aims to duplicate some if not all of the functionality of the toolbar for Mozilla, and while the current version 0.4 is still somewhat lacking, a new version that duplicates the look as well as the major search functionality (though not pagerank etc) is on the way soon, apparently. However, since this is an independent project and not affiliated with Google, I'm not sure if it would be able to access the rating system. Still, Mozilla users DO have the toolbar, and, since mozilla is cross-platform...

Re:The problem is..

[ImaLamer]

So google can't do an ARIN lookup now?