Slashdot Mirror
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.
that is all that will happen, how are they going to stop multiple "votes"? by a cookie (that the voter can erase)? By tracking IPs (they wont put the resources into that large and complex of a system?
I wish it would work, but it will be an abismal failure... in fact it wouldnt suprise me if some corperations hire people just to "vote" for their sites...
just look at ANY top 50/100 voting sites and you know what I am talking about
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
People who specialize in pushing sites into the top rankings--a technique known as search engine optimization--say the company's success has made Google a new frontier to conquer. And they assert that its system, like any other, can be outsmarted.
:)
This is particularly repugnant, especially given the goals set in the article (Google wants to make the search engine process more of a democracy, etc.) Is anybody else tired of soulless marketdroids essentially destroying all the good things that are the Net(C)(TM)(R)?
On the bright side, maybe there's room to add Slashdot-styled moderation and meta-moderation to Google rankings - imagine a "+1 Funny" rank for the Onion or a "-1, Offtopic" page rank for every time you go surfing for something honest and end up at Yet Another pr0n Site.
But what does my opinion matter, I just vote here. It's not like I have any money or anything.
Even if the system works fine (i.e., without abuse), it would be nice if the user still have the option to use it or the not (as the current system works very well).
:)
Better yet, they could have a slashdot-like user customization mechanism (i.e., where the user can set the threshold and moderate/vote a search result in many ways).
Anyway, I wish them luck too (Google rules
How you do it: After putting the page up, write a tool to hit google's voting engine over and over and over... giving yourself good ratings.
Question: How would the system prevent this type of abuse from happening - especially the opposite approach - rating competitors' sites poorly to drop them in the list?
Devil's Advocate Question: If you don't allow this abuse to occur, doesn't that then unfairly give extra ranking to sites based on age? A new site won't have accumulated as many votes as an old one yet, and so the ranking would always favor old (and likely to be out of date) sites over new ones.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
To establish such a system, Google needs to get users to create accounts. A more feasible solution may be cooperation with instant messaging providers, using their identity pool and friends lists as filter criteria. But if they want people to create accounts, they need to turn Google into a community. The first thing to do this would be to have an automatic discussion forum for every major website.
That, again, would create a lot of traffic, so they might be better off using a peer-to-peer app residing on the users' systems instead, which would also allow you to add website-specific real time chat, file sharing, micropayments and other nifty things. It would also make it easier to create responsive user interfaces, which is always a problem with web UIs.
It's gonna keep happening... A "new" search engine comes out with little bias... First it was Altavista, then Google. But after spending millions on hardware, software, and personnel, these companies realize "hey, this is cool, but I think our owners want us to make some money." There'll be a new bias-less marketing-free SE after Google, and after a while, their owners will ask them for some profit. It'll keep happening for as long as I can tell. But, all that said, I'm happy with Google right now ;)
I have seen all kinds of warez sites that force you to vote in order to get to parts of the site. Others could have frames that forge a vote each time a visitor comes to their site. While this is an intriguing idea, I don't see how it could work.
The whole idea of Google's PageRank was to count each link from another indexed site as a vote. What was wrong with that scheme? Doesn't everyone currently think Google is the best engine out there? If so why "fix" it?
I like the suggestion someone else made about showing the vote results but not having them acutally affect the search results.
Why aren't we told when editors moderate our posts?
Especially since for many unscrupulous businesses, ratings in search engines directly translate to dollars. Taco you moron have a little faith. This is google we're talking about. Name one feature they've screwed up that badly. If it can't be done so that companies can't take advantage of it realise that it won't be done at all. And taco, you ignorant bastard, you'd think that after you created a user-ranked web site companies can't take advantage of you would realise that anyone can do it.
I can't spell or type, but that doesn't mean I'm unusually stupid.
Think about it. According to the article, the system is currently just collecting information, it isn't affecting rankings -- yet. So in a couple of weeks Google will look at this new data, look at the corresponding pages, then figure out what should be done. Why are we assuming that they will just do a linar mapping between the number of happy faces and relevance?
I wouldn't put it past them to dynamically map relevance with a far more complicated function. User rankings are another non-random data stream. All information (even negative information) is useful. Just as long as one strips it from its labels, and looks at it blindly. Can you say neural networks?
Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
In the current times lots of folks are happy to throw away their liberties in the pursuit of the vague concept of terrorists. Sites that decry this would likely be modded down because their opinions would be contrary to the masses.We've seen it on Slashdot when dissenting opinions (pro-Microsoft, pro-DMCA, pro-RIAA) are modded down without really looking at the validity of the argument.
Maybe there should be a new category -- something like "Worthy argument, but..." which would remove the emotional connotation and focus on the validity of the argument.
As slashdot got Meta-Moderation, i think google should use Meta-Rating, so users could help detect spammers.
/metamod.pl.
Oh, by the way, if you're already a Slashdot moderator and want to know if you can Meta-Moderate, just check
-J
Alexis 'jeriqo' BRET
Users who perenially search outside of corporate sites could be able to customize their setting so that they'd have to select when they want to include corporate sites. Could it work? I don't know.
Google already has a 'customized' interface that allows users to do things like change language, etc...
I think the sugestion of separating corporate and non-corporate searches has its merits. I hate searching for an anime fanfiction and being directed to Best Buy's website because they happen to carry the anime title I mentioned in the search query.
It has its problems too, however. Tagging each of the pages in Google's truly massive search database with a corporate or non-corporate tag is a non-trivial problem. For obvious reasons, website owners cannot be trusted to tag their own pages.
You're also opening a can of worms here, since many website owners will protest either a commercial or a non-commercial tagging.
Even if you tagged sites by domain, you'd still have hundreds of thousands... possibly millions of domains, not to mention sites that carry both corporate and private content like Geocities, Tripod, or other free webhosts.
Then you have to consider what to do with semi-for-profit pages? Many pages have 'tipping jars' now. Many open-source software development pages have information about for-profit works, or are developed by for-profit organizations. Should companies like Redhat be excluded from non-profit searches? Probably. How about Vorbis Ogg? That's not nearly so clear. How about web-comics, almost all of which give away their content freely, but sell merchandise, dead-tree books, or other premiums.
In the end, I think that I'd rather put up with having to sort through twenty or so highly relevant results to get the search result I wanted rather than having to search twice to make sure that I get all the possible relevant results.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
The article clearly states that Google will use the results to supplement, not replace, current methods. So, if someone wishes to manipulate the results, they will have to combine several forms of cheating to succeed.
The article also states that methods will be used to prevent this sort of abuse, though Google doesn't say (for obvious reasons -- why do spammers work for them?) what they are.
But there are obvious ways to defeat abuse. One way is to do IP matching, and cull results originating from a single domain. Another would to use only a random representative sampling of votes, rather than every vote, in counting results. Another is simple human oversite (or good AI), looking for unusual ranking changes.
Google's been great so far in avoiding the crapfloods. I doubt if they'd cut their own throats. The fact that they are testing this technology rather than just rolling it out is a good sign. When's the last time you heard of a search engine testing before implementation?
Barely-relevant anecdote:
The year that Excite debuted, I found my own credit card number, expiration date and phone number in their database. By pattern matching I found the same for a couple of dozen other people who had all patronized the same online bookstore (idiots momentarily had their customer database on the webserving machine, excite's spider found it).
It took about a week to find someone at Visa who knew what the Internet was (a security VP). He informed me that Excite had been designed with no means to edit the database. I found that hard to believe -- still do -- but my personal info remained findable for several weeks thereafter.
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
Maybe OpenDirectory could add a rate-an-editor feature for their users. If you wanna talk about abuse, look there, not to Google.
It'd be good to see something resembling peer review on the web after all.
Tsk, tsk. Google coders are smart cookies. They aren't gonna want 5,000,000 positive rankings from three IPs.
Now, if one were to write Code Red III which forms a distributed network and ranks up websites that are injected into the network...
User-Agent: * /
Disallow:
Think about it - how many people do you think are out there with a half-clue who decide that they want to prevent evil robots from indexing their site without realizing that they therefore won't wind up on search engines? Apparently Google seems to have run into this situation and now e-mails webmasters who have potentially accidently blocked all robots from indexing their pages.
Now there may be a valid reason to completely block your site from all robots. But think about how pointless it really is - how many webmasters really want to drive away search engines? Most people want to show up on search engines, especially people whose site shows up as a domain (ie, http://slashdot.org/ as opposed to http://www.wherever.edu/~they/started/).
Seriously, why did you block the entire domain from web crawlers? While there definately are good reasons, it seems sensible for Google to send a "are you really sure you want to do that" message, especially since the linked "spam" was sent to someone who apparently had four domains they had blocked off from search engines. This sounds like something that an amatuer webmaster may have accidently done without thinking about the consequences. In which case the e-mail makes sense: "Did you really mean to do that? If so, ignore this message - if not, here's a way to fix it."
I really think you're overreacting to a fairly innocent e-mail.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Becuase that doesn't tell if you clicked and didn't like the page. Just because one person clicks on a junk page doesn't mean that page should be higher rated for the next person.