Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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.

5 of 332 comments (clear)

  1. How this new system might *reduce* abuse by dmoen · · Score: 5, Interesting
    A few weeks ago, I encountered "spam" on google. 8 of the top 10 links had been captured by a spammer using "cloaking" technology:
    One method, called "cloaking," sets up a dummy page including lots of relevant information for keywords hidden through a special link. The cloaked page is fed to the search engine to boost a site's search ranking for specific terms such as "games," "sports" or "books." When surfers go to that link, however, they see a page that is different from the one indexed by the crawler.
    I can't show you what it looks like, since Google has already fixed the problem.

    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.
  2. Might work if... by BluePenguin · · Score: 5, Interesting
    You know, this might work if Google implemented it the right way. I'm just thinking there are a few simple things they could do right off...

    1. 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.
    2. 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.
  3. Re:Why not just monitor clickthroughs? by realdpk · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. How to make automated votes expensive by Tom7 · · Score: 5, Interesting


    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 ... I'm glad to see it happen.

  5. Re:Why not just monitor clickthroughs? by Alomex · · Score: 4, Interesting
    This doesn't make any sense. Higher rated results will automatically get more clickthroughs.

    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...