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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.
Perhaps they could disqualify corporate business websites from being ranked.
Thanks,
Travis
forkspoon@hotmail.com
Well that directly addresses the Ask Slashdot submission I made yesterday as to whether or not there was such a thing as a user moderated search engine. I'll have to check it out.
an IP address doesn't neccessarily equate to a person. Companies can have thousands of IPs and google can't tell if its just one entity or 3000. I would predict that if this goes into effect the gator advertising thing thats bundled with just about any free download these days will be modified to rank up pages of those who pay them the most.
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WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
Though Google claims the voting system won't directly, and more importantly, immediately, have any effect on results of a search, I think they're going to have to spend a lot of money on abuse detection.
What I wanted then was a "moderate" button I could click beside the link to indicate that it was spam. With a voting system like this, Google could locate and remove spam a lot quicker. Maybe that's what this is all about.
Doug Moen.
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
- Don't put "rate this sight" next to every hit. Instead, use a system of random assignment. Every x(where x is a random number) hits, give the user a "rate this site" dialogue. This cuts down on the potential for direct abuse.
- Add an option to sort by user rating, or sort by the current standard. This way, if people don't want to see user rated results, they don't have to.
I love google and all, but some of the things that make it to the top of the list from time to time are as useful to me as a 16 bit dos driver (for my RS/6000). It'd be good to see something resembling peer review on the web after all. Who knows, even if it fails, it might spark something that works! Best of luck google!If I can't see it in Lynx I'm not interested.
I don't know how many times I have searched for something and get a perfect looking search result only to find out it is a broken link. I have not used all of the search engines out there but I don't remember any of the ones that I have used having an obvious method to flag a link as broken.
I know that their spiders go through the database and verify links but I'd be willing to bet that is takes months to go over it once. Why not flag links as broken and have the spider verify/remove those first?
Just cleaning up the broken links could improve the search results.
Help out Project Gutenberg!
Distributed Proofreaders http://charlz.dns2go.com/gutenberg
They already monitor clickthroughs for 1% of the users hitting their site each day. Sometimes you'll notice it because the URLs you see when you hover over the links are different.
I think the bias comes from the web site owners, not the search engine owner. After a "new" search engine becomes popular, all the spammers target it until they figure out how to manipulate that search engine's ranking. And then that opens up the field for a search engine using a completely different type of ranking. Parasite adaptation.
Provided that they can keep users from voting multiple times through ip tracking (can you imagine the size of the database for that), they will probably run into the same symptoms that mp3.com's top 40 boards had, there were usually the same group of artists or songs on that board because few people ever explored the rest of the mp3.com archives. But maybe since google isn't the place housing the content, it will be different.
As one who got his entire university cut off from Google in a shell-scripting nightmare (they turned it back on after they learned all the hits were for an AI project), let me say that Google knows when you hit them too hard. Read their terms of service.
Also, I think they would know a thing or two about normalizing the data to correct for the age of a site.
It's not that hard to make it really expensive to forge votes. For instance, check out the captcha project at CMU. (Basically, it generates images that are difficult for a computer to recognize, but easy for a human, and challenges the user to respond to them in some way to prove that they are human.) If they could find the right balance of convenience for humans and difficulty for perl scripts, I think they'd have a great thing going. I have always wanted this feature in a search engine
is if i had a way of decreasing the ranking of my own site for particular search terms.
eg, my site used to be called '/dev/random' but i changed the name when i realized that it was in the search engines for that term and that most people who were searching for '/dev/random' probable weren't looking for my weblog. i'd love to have some kind of 'anti-keyword' meta tag that i could use to tell the googlebots that i'd rather not be associated with that search term anymore.
i know... somewhat off topic and boring... sue me.
Smokey the Bear says, "Strip mining prevents forest fires!"
From the google terms of service:
... increase traffic to your Web site for commercial reasons"
"You may not use the Google Search Services to
Doesn't this apply to most every company who lists their site on Google?
Not only are they not idiots, they actually seem to care about how their engine works. I emailed them a while back about a page that turned up very high in a search result, that was obviously not relevant at all. Not only did they look into the problem, but they emailed me back to tell me it was fixed. Think you'll get that kind of service from yahoo?
Casca
As someone who used to use Epinions all the time (making over $1000 from them), I have to say that the epinions "Web of Trust" system seems to work rather well, at least on a small scale (100,000 users).
Basically, you can see what users rated the article as useful. If you think that certain people have similar tastes to you, you put them in your Web of Trust. You'll get articles posted in a different order depending on who you trusted.
It is actually more complicated than that, as there are epinions "Experts" who are judged by epinions to have good ratings. I think Amazon has a similar system (and has way more users, but the system still seems to work ok).
The big problem is that the internet at large has so many bloody users and so many bloody pages... I think introducing groups of users or groups of groups that you trust might be a better way for the Web of Trust idea to work with the internet at large.
1) Get anyone who wants to rate sites to make an account. Yes, it's a pain, but that way you can track people's rating activities, like on /.
/.)
2) Use the Yahoo! style system of having an image that you have to type the word in from to create an account. Keep changing the way the image is formed. This should *help* to prevent account creation spam.
3) Give people a certain number of points per day / week / month (ala
4) Make it so that everyone has to balance out +ves and -ves - that is, somehow make sure that they can't just do one or the other.
5) Make it so that each account can only rate a particular site once. Now this requires quite a bit of storage, because you've got to store every rating ever individually instead of just a counter, but that way you can prevent multiple rating on some corporate site.
Note that this prevents the idea of rating a site based on how appropriate it is for a particular search, which is admittedly one of the really exciting parts of this (that is, if I search for Transistors and get www.electronics.com then I rate it 'Good'. If I search for Open Source and get www.electronics.com then I rate it as 'Bad'.)
With this system instead of this I just rate www.electronics.com according to how good the site is, not how relevant it is. Maybe that's what they're aiming for, maybe it's not.
I think that would help stop it but it all depends on the security of the account creation process - if it's easy to spam then the whole system becomes a waste of time.
It also doesn't prevent the problem of people being paid for ratings, which is possible, or for a company getting every single one of its employees to vote for the company. Thinking about that, one solution could be to just say that a company's rating can't go above a certain level and can only increase at a certain speed.
Or you could have metamoderation. This sounds more and more like Slash based code all the time!
' Ore stabit fortis a fine placet ore stat '
- found on a park bench
Duh, you can adjust for that.
Compute the standard distribution of click-throughs according to position in the result set and any page outdoing this number gets "moded" up, any one underperforming this number gets moded down...
No Slashdot poster has been able to reliably get their posts modded to +5 yet.
If Google (or another search engine) set up all links to visit an internal google page that quickly redirected the user to the target site, it could rate on how many people visited the site, instead of a potentially biased rating of users.
Of course, shady websites could still influence it, either by hitting the pages themselves, or by crafting their page so that the google-selected text is tempting to search engine users, but the system still has the advantage of not requiring active participation of users.
Just my $.02
For instance, check out the captcha project [captcha.net] at CMU.
I looked at captcha and found that it may generate problems with disability legislation in some jurisdictions. For instance:
The only accessible test (fbw) doesn't always work, and the other three are not accessible to those with disabilities. Watch somebody get sued under the ADA.
Will I retire or break 10K?