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Google Letting Users Rank Search Results

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the coming-soon-to-a-net-near-you dept.

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.

4 of 332 comments (clear)

  1. Google Attack Engine by Caball · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  2. Win32 by jeriqo · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

    --
    Alexis 'jeriqo' BRET
  3. They aren't stupid by 90XDoubleSide · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.

    --
    "Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
  4. Googlebar for non-ie by WPL510 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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...