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

Great, but ..

[Eloquence]

.. this will only work when combined with trust metrics. There are certainly different views on what constitutes a quality site, and if you just let everyone vote, you get a fuzzy average (plus you have problems filtering false votes). So what you need is a system of identity where you can say "Show me all pages rated highly by people in my trusted user list".

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.

Give Google some credit

[FTL]

Google aren't idiots. Don't be so quick to post about how this will be a huge failure and how easy it will be to defeat the system.

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?

OpenDirectory

[Ratbert42]

Maybe OpenDirectory could add a rate-an-editor feature for their users. If you wanna talk about abuse, look there, not to Google.