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 Google won't have "f1rst postz!!!!11" and trolls.
Perhaps they could disqualify corporate business websites from being ranked.
Thanks,
Travis
forkspoon@hotmail.com
Well as the marketing director for an unscrupulous business, let me be the first to say how much I am looking foward to being able to rate my competitors' websites on one of the most popular search engines.
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.
this is certainly a valid problem to try and solve. for example, i just searched for "clueless phony" and jon katz's name was nowhere to be found.
The point is that I think the belief is that the new system will provide for this.
If it ain't a Model M, it's a piece of crap.
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.
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
No, that's the point. The new system encourages it. The previous metric used by Google was weighted links-to to determine the value of the look-up. I think the rating system is far more vulnerable to abuse.
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...
Google doesnt accept bribes to rate a certain website the first on the list. It doesnt matter if a company starts rating itself up. there will be restrictions on that I'm sure. but other people will be able to rate that site as not useful for a particular search. It will be the masses helping to determine what results are useful in addition with googles excellent back end
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.
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.
m l
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/23069.ht
Oh.. you mean like politicians don't accept bribes...
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
What? because you are too lazy to rate something? i know i will be rating sites for many of my searches. I should hope you would. so the only minority is it takes effort to do it. Im sure they will make it easy, possibly with that toolbar? How is this a big sellout. because they are giving you the power to rate a site. This also isnt a replacement to the current system. The current system works well, but it something like this could make a very cool addition.
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.
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.
Unfortunitly people tend to rate on Personal reasons rather than by quality of a site. If people actually ranked it by quality it would be a very nice way of filtering all the Junk, and maybe dead links, out of search engines.
--
FearLinux.com
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.
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.
I just pray that with this, Google will have a tickbox on whether or not you want to have a page ranked - Less Money for Google, better searches for me.
Besides, doesn't Pagerank on Google's toolbar already do this in its own way?
- 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.
Why not just monitor which links searchers choose?
Amazing magic tricks
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 trust google , they say something i believe it. i have no reason not to. they have always had a consistent history of being honest. politicions though, probably not the most honest indviduals out there.
Currently, Google's proprietary system ranks sites primarily by words listed on the page, terms used in a page's title or similar factors. It also ranks a page's popularity, determined by the number--and importance--of sites linking to a page. For example, a page that is linked to 100 times from a reputable newspaper's Web site would rank higher than a page linked to 500 times from a porn site.
I do like this feature, it truly shows the worth of a web page in other peoples eyes, not just the eyes of the webmaster who created the thing...
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
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
I agree with your concern about how useful or fair this will prove to be. I think there's a good fundamental goal of improving the quality of hits; but without really strong metamoderation, I can't see how this could be made fair. (I suspect it's probably more important to weed out irrelevant/bad hits, which might perhaps be easier to police.)
I wonder whether a bunch of volunteer moderators might be a better solution -- give them some freebie benefit for spending a few hours a day reviewing other people's searches and picking out the best and worst responses. But of course, those moderators won't know what original search was after, soo all they could do is weed out the pr0n sites etc.
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
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
This is truly idiotic, since robots.txt has never been a default part of any web server installation I've ever done, so it's completely a voluntary thing to create the file, and every webmaster should be WELL AWARE what this file does (by virtue of the fact that they had to create it). I mean, duh guys.
Yeah, so I'm off topic. But I just got the spam this morning, and I used to respect Google quite a bit, and witnessing them resorting to spam emails, begging us to let them spider our sites really tarnished their image, so let me rant a little. :p
Oh, and let's not forget about google suggesting robots.txt as a method to protect sensitive data recently. Be nice if they could decide if they wanted us to create robots.txt, or not..
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.
The existing Google ranking system is already exploited by users who set up hundreds of dummy sites that all link to a certain site using a variety of keywords, thus feeding the G! machine bogus "popularity" information.
A ranking system will just make this easier to do. Your average skript kiddie could easily bombard Google with a heap of "Yeah this is great!" ratings for his site, thus bumping it up many notches.
User-ranking systems work as long as there's no huge desire to do so. Slashdot doesn't have *too* many problems because nobody really cares that much if they get rated "+6 - Rad!"...however, there's a much greater motivation to have one's website come up tops in one of the most popular search engines....
Got Rhinos?
I still use HotBot a lot.
When someone yells "Stop" or goes limp, or taps out, the fight is over.
Actually they do. The sponsored links show up first and are clearly indicated to be paid for.
Personally I think their system ain't broke, though, so why fix it?
I do not have a signature
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.
How long will it take before someone automates a script to rate some site(s) artificially high or low? Any wagers?
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
are you saying you don't trust your own presedent? i hope so, cause if he was mine, i would go hijack a plane and blow up the... oops offtopic.
They say every man has his price. And if i owned a large search engine and someone like microsoft for example offered me a large sum of money, i would want to take if off their hands.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
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.
I wonder how long it will take me and LWP to get a search for "slashdot" to point to http://goatse.cx?
Get busy living or get busy dying. Carpe diem.
Businesses (read, spammers) will either simply pay people a lot of money to search a lot of words and rank their sites high, or write a script that does it for them. Mainly, its porn sites that do this. For instance, try searching for some innocent word, and you're likely to find a porn site somewhere. While this is definately a step forward in eliminating the problem of catch-pages (pages with many random words to catch search engines), it won't last for long.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
The idea of rating based on user "votes" is one I see bound to failure. Google would need an enormous trusted user base, and logins would be required ('cause I could spoof any IP out there for votes). Talk about unnecessary complexity for a search engine.
What is more interesting is what a few companies have been doing recently in the search engine world (there really still is business after the dot-com fallout, even if it isn't profitable). At my work, we recently looked into a product by a company called Recommind. Their search engine was able to find similar words in documents, and could give you related documents that didn't have key words. It could even distinguish between java (the coffee), java (the language), and Java (the island near Jakarta)! Pretty cool stuff. Combine that type of "concept matching" instead of "keyword matching" with Google's technology, and you've got the next generation search engine.
All very cool stuff. I hope they don't kill it.
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.
It's just a question of time when spammers start scripted "voting" to push their pages on top.
Google might block such "votes", but I suppose the traffic created by all the spammers worldwide will act like an ulta ddos attack on google.
In AI this is called "learning by reinforcement".
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
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.
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.
Anybody that can't spell President has no right to criticize the one we have. It's dumbasses like you that get people like GWB in office. It's good to know that you have weak morals and shouldn't be trusted by anyone.
At least this will keep the internet interesting. Activity and change keep things from dying out.
Especially since for many unscrupulous businesses, ratings in search engines directly translate to dollars.
But we've all seen first hand how easy it is to stop unscrupulousness through meta-moderation!
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
there are more ways to abuse this than just businesses, if you remember the GW bush google trick from the election. I can just see how confusing it will be to get information like this. This could seriously undermine the usefulness of google. If we get trash for searches, it will begin to resemble the other search engines. Wt least we knew that when they ranked the pages, they new what was going on, opeing it up to the world basically means multiplying the GW bush trick.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
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
This is a great idea. Google already had an excellent idea in rating sites by counting the links to the site to defeat keyword clogging, and now they're adding one more layer to the quality control.
Hats off to Google, yet again. Keep up the good work, guys.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Yes! Yes! Yes!
Collaborative filtering for the masses! Reputation management! Can Annotea comment servers be far behind?(!)
Build it in to Mozilla.
IP tracking? That won't work.
You have heard of NAT, right?
Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.
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
Hey, they've got to make money somehow. The 'sponsored links' are far from annoying compared to banner ads or popups. They clearly label and set off with different colors the sponsored links and after using google a 100 times a day you learn to tune them out.
I'm with you on the rating system, if it ain't broke don't fix it.
In order for users to rate a site, they should have to provide a valid e-mail address that Google can perform a reverse lookup on.
As stated by others, Google should provide the standard sort with a user rating next to the displayed sites. Then allow the user to click a button to sort by user rating. Or just provide a button to allow the user to select Google Sort or User Rating Sort on the main search page.
There is a site that does something just like this called Coolhomepages.com. It's not a search engine, but it has sites broken down into different categories (DHTML, Flash, Typographic, Retro, etc.) and visitors can rate the sites from 1 to 10 stars, or submit sites they feel deserving. A lot of the web designers I work with go to the site and look around for "inspiration."
BigCat79
"The dead have risen and are voting Republican!" --Bart Simpson
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!"
I had no intention of appearing to disparage the sponsored links. I think they are appropriately and tastefully done.
I do not have a signature
Couldn't they use a statistical analysis to verify if voting is "honest". I bet you could pretty easily detect normal voting behaviour as well as biased voting behaviour.
I'm pretty sure there's a branch of statistics that examines such problems.
JPM
--- Worst tagline ever.
Can someone give a explanation of "cloaking" that's not dumbed down to the point of uselessness?
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
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
Is there a provision for meta-modding at Google?
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
I'm pretty sure there's a way to detect "malicous voting patterns" pretty easily using basic statistical analysis. Just examine voting patern variations over time and look for suspicious variations.
I'm pretty sure a branch of statistics is already solving similar problems
JP
--- Worst tagline ever.
I'm all for the ability to rate a search result as long as I have the option of ignoring ratings when I search. Sometimes I want to find the less popular pages. Some little-known sites have very usefull information, and they become very hard to find when they don't get ranked as often larger sites. I'm very impressed with Google thus far, and I'm sure they'll do this well. Their advanced search keywords are just wonderfull.
I tend to trust Google too, but I think you under-rate the devious abilities of bored corporate minions to work around rating system restrictions that are supposed to keep them from artificially boosting their site's rating. I give it a week or two before someone comes up with a script that relatively quickly and easily will artificially elevate a rating. This sort of thing is too easy to abuse, especially for a necessarily open system like a public search engine.
No relation to Happy Monkey
if google only allows positive marks to be given then I see no harm done really. consider microsoft wants some of its pages ranked highly, so it gets the vote out on some of them nice and high. same goes for a group of friends or so. so we might disagree with the actuall quality of the site, but at least we know it is an important one in the eyes of the author.
the problem, is if negative ranking is allowed and you get into a Ximian - KDE kind of situation where one company deliberatly tries to mislead or undervalue a site (or in my case a search criteria). that would be bad - can you imagine some pro choice site - it would get slammed in a minute!
if there are too many highly ranked sites it doesn't really bother me so much, I think the payoff is potentially good though - hopefully when I search for sqsh in the future, I'll get the home page near the first hit that is a little more current.
h
There was an article on New Scientist about some technology similar to this. It would analyze what parts of a web page were hit the most, and bring those to the foreground (think bigger, bolder links), and shrink or kill off the unused links.
It's all part of the process of creating a more "intellegent" web.
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?
Ok you make a page that has all sorts of info on a subject like 1966 Mustangs. The page has everything you ever wanted to know about the car. But you secretly put something in the page, like a server-side redirect, that takes the user and sends them to a page about Cameros. So you submit the page and the search engines give a high ranking because the page has a lot of good info on Mustangs. But people that go to the page get sent to a different page that talks about something else.
Whats funny about this is that the search engines already know this. The Marketing Director at the company I work for told me that this hasn't worked in a couple of years. Some engines send a second agent out to see if the page the page at that link is the same as one that got indexed. I think this a case of whoever wrote the artice isn't up to date on search engine technology.
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
Of course people are speculating how this will be used by bad companies to increase their visibility.
All i can say is...
I WANT THAT JOB!!!!
To sit on the web all day increasing my company's rating. And if any of you programmers get a silly idea of writing a script to automate it, you'll put me out of a good job, and I will be very unhappy, and will have to return to browsing the web INSTEAD of working...
very good point, but there is a different between co's and individuals. If a company does it and its against the policies of google, they can be more accountable and all it'd take is one person to get nailed for it, unfortunately it'd through the courts so thats another story
1-10 Unscrupulous companies taking advantage of new ranking system
11-20 Unscrupulous companies taking advantage of older methods such as creating fake websites
21 A humorous site that really has nothing to do with your search but has been modded up 'cause it's funny.
22-30 Somewhat legit sites that are still abusing the system but not as much as the others.
31-34 Somewhat relevent sites
35 A site with no relevence but one that attracts a lot of clueless people
36-40 Getting better
40+ Results you were looking for.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
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
I insist Google to be renamed as Slash/Google from now on. ;-)
Why not tie users with IP and
allow them moderation privilidges
(only from time to time) a la slashdot?
You cannot create a gazillion bots
unless you have a gazillion IPs
(in which case you are easy to block
assuming all are in the same domain).
The downside could be spoofing (not to difficult to counter - I assume) and a somewhat long time before sites might get moderated.
So am I missing something?
Taco should have patented slashdot moderation and karma whoring...
Pardonne
Maybe OpenDirectory could add a rate-an-editor feature for their users. If you wanna talk about abuse, look there, not to Google.
This is the kind of idea (put two known good ideas, mix in "internet", boom!) that seems like it would have a bogus patents on it.
Try a search for "fuck me" and hit "I'm feeling lucky."
I'll spoil the end: a website called Textism, which has nothing to do with fucking or me. It's rigged, a deliberate manipulation, and it worked fantastically well.
He explains on his site how that worked, and how it worked so well.
Excellent site on typography too....
No sig is worth reading.
Many scrupled businesses are also able to measure search engine ranking on their bottom lines.
Warning: This signature may offend some viewers.
jailbreakist did it! :-)
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
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.
Ah trust ... an excellent idea.
:)
Eloquence - do you think it would be possible to build a 'proof-of-concept' of a collaboratively filtered (well recommender-system) Google through a proxy server that routes one's Google searches.
My itch is, rather than send an email when I find a page a friend might like, to have a way to 'flag' that page so that the next time my friend is searching on Google (and the flagged page would have shown up in the results anyway) it is high-lighted as having been recommended by me.
I think that this could be built on a proxy server - has anyone tried this yet?
Cheers
James
... who has been away from info-anarchy too long
No thank you.
I've spent all of 10 minutes thinking about it, granted, but I can't figure out how this won't be abused.
And, you know, they do a great job of searching and ranking already. I think their text ads are fair and unobtrusive and a great way to get your page seen.
I just don't see what the value add is here.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
. .
Hmm, well, before you posted with a description of "cloaking" I ran a Google search on - web page cloaking - and got this result as the first hit :
Website,web page cloaking and stealth technology
Which is some company trying to make money from doing this. See the next page in their pitch : http://webprominence.co.uk/promotion/costs.htm
No w, if cloaking is easily defeated by a second bot, and the Googlebot has this, shouldn't they at least put _their_ own_ link in top slot just saying, "by the way, this kind of stuff is dishonest, misleading and doesn't work" [and thus possibly a fraud?]
Yeah, sure, no - one's going to do this for the n categories across 1.6bln indexed pages for every possible scam scam, but I'd have thought this kind of thing would be obvious "customer protection / advice" on Google's part. I'd _want_ people to know my search engine couldn't be scammed (at the very least by techniques I could defeat and I was indexing for a possible cheater)
On second thoughts, I'd be just as happy to let the lame would - be tricksters / cloakers whatever waste their money.
On the other hand, isn't it that kind of thought (as I just had) which has left the whole web / Internet up for grabs by the slickest over the dumbest and ultimately hurt the bright people who cared?
Moderation and meta - mod on the scale of the *web*???!!! Man, that'd sounds crazy to me. Slashdot scaled n - fold . . . Can't bear to think about it . . gotta go . . .
Much like my bland, meaningless slashdot posts, my webpages will now be subject to the same lack of positive moderation. Geez.
However, recently the ad which appears for marijuana changed to NewScientist.com, a science journal which has been publishing much more balanced and thorough information on weed, some of which advocates that weed is less dangerous than alcohol. Also the top result is NORML, a legalization-advocacy group. (This is probably not due to tampering w/ the search engine, but is interesting)
I believe that The Powers That Be within Google have taken the more moderate, academic drug stance, as opposed to gov't-sponsored propaganda. Google's pretty influential, Internet-culture-wise. Food for thought.
(Offtopic, sort of, i know, but I saw a Google story and had to run with it!)
--hongpong.com
Right now Google is funded by VCs looking for a quick buck on the IPO bandwagon (eventually). They'll probably wait until the 'dot-bomb' hysteria dies down. But the plan was always to IPO.
I wonder if it would be possible for individuals more interested in having a good search engine rather then reams of profit to buy a large enough chunk of the company in order to keep the company the same way it is now?
That said, I'm sure google's people have thought this out a lot more then slashdot's On Crack(TM) moderation system (maybe something more like kuro5hin's, with averaged rather then additive scoring).
On the other hand, you're always going to have a problem with majority tastes, which would class N'Sync as better then Radiohead...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Well, given slashdot's rather... uh... interesting interface given comments that have been modded down I can only assume that you're responding to the post about Gator software, and not some other post I can't see.
In which case, you'd be wrong. Gator is basically a combination Spyware/local add server that replaces advertising on the 'net with it's own. And it runs locally on people's PCs. Millions of PCs. And those PCs aren't all on the same network.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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...
Okay so the idea of letting people choose their own favorite sites is great and all, but I don't think it's going to work as more than just an idea if there isn't a lot of thought put into it. We'll end up getting a million popup 'vote for my site' windows when we visit CNN, a-la those stupid warez sites...
I feel that as long a the net's being used as a competitive marketplace the results that search engines return will never be fully relevant.
echo $wittysigline;
Maybe the reason k5 died is because of clueless wonks like you poisoned it with your inane, OT drivel.
K5 died because, well, one of CPUs like fell out of the socket or somethen when some morons were moving the server.
Kuro5hin has been down for a few days, and will probably continue to be down for a few more for the reasons I'll reveal here. First off, we've had some colo problems. VHosting is great, but VHosting can't control it when the people who actually have the rack/cage space decide to move (without telling anyone) a hundred or so of their customer's servers to another facility.
Anyway, slashdot's moderation system is pretty lame, kuro5hin's just works better.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
From the second-ranked result:
Barely used original AB ROLLER and instructional videotape for $40 or best offer. Call (please don't e-mail; I don't check it frequently) Jon Katz, (202)...
Damn, Google really pinpoints the goods!
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
When I'm not pimping for autopr0n.com my regular account on slashdot is in the 20,000s! and my k5 account is in the 140s! I'm better then both of you! Bow down to my overwhelming l33tn3s! Hell, I'm not l337, I'm l336! It's a lower number, get it? Oh yeh.
Anyway, I find it humorous that two people who's UID's are probably different by probably a month or two arguing over non-newbie ness.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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
I don't agree, but Teoma is good.
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
No Slashdot poster has been able to reliably get their posts modded to +5 yet.
How does crapping up the search engine results produce profits? It doesn't, and the article pretty clearly indicates that Google is implementing this to abate the effects of corporate cheaters. Particularly note that Google is looking at this as a supplement to their established methods, not as a replacement.
There are plenty of ways to prevent corporate concerns crapping up the voting results, as I pointed out previously.
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
Well, their system doesn't have binary failure. It's really good right now, but it could definitely be better. There are (admittedly rare) times when I feel like my searches aren't handled as well as they could be. This is just one possible way they could improve their relevance.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Your comment about unscrupulous business relying on search rankings is about as cogent as saying that a lot of unscrupulous businesses rely on prime streetfront property to directly translate to dollars. Businesses in general rely on tactics like these to generate customers. This is why businesses pay real money to get listed for certain words. This is why businesses pay real money for a prime storefront location.
/. would get upset at the mere CONCEPT of a peer-review system for a search engine. I would think that any method that ranks link popularity (however defined) over corporate sponsorship would be a Good Thing.
Believe me, as an e-commerce consultant I can see the cost/benefit analysis of this tactic, and it works. Like any marketing plan, it can be used for great good or evil (make sure you say this with an Alec Guinness accent).
Furthermore, I'm surprised that anybody who takes the time to read and post here at
www.clarke.ca
the rating should be randomized in getting the input:
Request # 1:
rate this site from 1-10 with 10 being the best
Request # 2:
rate the site from 1-10 with 1 being the best
so an automated script cannot keep on voting for 10 or 1 for a site.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
Um, there are only four billion possible IP address, even if from each IP people voted on a thousand pages a month, you'd only have 1k*URLlength*4billion, or about 1 terabyte or so. Considering a mole is like 6.0*10^18(iirc) you'd have trillions times less bits then you would have atoms in a cup of water.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Actualy, the way k5 works is that after uses have gotten a certan amount of 'mojo' which is a 'temproaly weighted' average of the ratings done to them, they become 'trusted users', and they can vote posts to zero. If a post is at zero, then only other trusted users can see it. It actualy works extreemly well, because only people who are smart (or at least can write well) can remove things from view. k5 dosn't (or didn't) have any of the crapflood style problems of slashdot when it was running.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
With the decision of the judge to throw out your case today, are you planning an appeal?
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?
In the original message two weeks ago when Google announced the new beta reporting system over at Webmasterworld the Google tech in charge of the system said:
"Let me repeat that this is a test. I would not recommend trying to write a votebot. Remember the line from Indiana Jones--"choose wisely"? We have several interesting tricks to prevent vote stuffing, so I would choose not to try abusing it. Looks like this is also going to be a fun psychological experiment."
While its true that slashdot gets a lot more traffic, it gets porportionaly way, way, more spam/crap. There are actualy less 'zeroed' comments on k5 then there are front page stories (most of the time), and those are almost always simply over-the-line insults and stuff. There is none of the 'penis-bird' type bullshit that slashdot seems to get at all
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Any kind of user-moderated web service is inherantly flawed and can in no way be successful.
My Karma was at 49, then they switched to words. All that work for nothing!
It produces profits by allowing companies to pay for higher listings.
I think there is a problem with such ranking, which is, that Userus Usually get to rank the first results, but they don't rank the later. This might turn out unfair.
Slashdot gets crapped on only because they don't delete posts and that has lead to a weird little culture that grows below most people thresholds.
But, -1 Penis Birds I can handle, as with the good k-whores and trolls. What buggers me is the poorly written content-free posts that do nothing but reiterate politically-acceptable drivel and beaten-to-death-in-1998 jokes (such as the post one at the root of this thread).
K5 doesn't have a real solution to that (other than to keep the story mix changing), and as the community grows and the bar gets lowered, the standard for what's considered a good post will fall with it. (I see it happening there already) I think slash, with 200 posts/hour, has accepted the fact that most people suck and just given us an essentially arbitrary and random system to cut the #s of posts down to a reasonable number.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Perhaps the google ranking system could use the user submitted data to automatically tune itself. If people's rankings are deviating from the rankings the engine comes up with, it could run some simulations (or genetic algorithm or whatever) and try some slightly tweaked settings. Eventually, it should converge with the users.
This might be an interested project for someone, a genetic algorithm based neural network page ranking search engine. Those buzzwords alone would have been enough to get a few $million a couple of years ago.
why let users control the popularity of pages by vote when the traffic to the page speaks for itself???
-- Betting on the survival of the media industry is a serious risk. I advise investing elsewhere.
Where are you people getting this 'spam the system' bs from?
Don't you relize that Google is the ONLY search engine to put out a encryption system in their urls (ie toolbar) that has NEVER been cracked? Even Goto's expensive session tracker encrypted urls has has been hammered out.
Don'tcha think that if Goggle can do that with their own toolbar, they can do that with something as simple as a generated on the fly form submission. Of course they can.
Those that try to spam google will fastly find their sites and urls banned - for life.
If it is so easy to abuse, why hasn't anyone been able to abuse it yet? It's been three weeks and no one has succeeded yet. (theres more to that of course)
/. in to supporting them (just a major corporation). So what - they use Linux.
Google is the only entity on the net not to have their encoded/encrypted urls cracked open. AOL, Goto, and Altavista's various encoding schemes have all been laid wide open.
Only Googles encoding scheme in the ie toolbar has not been hacked. If you'll look at the voting system, you'll find a similar system.
>but I think you under-rate the devious
>abilities of bored corporate minions
I think you underate the devious abilities of the corporate monster that Google has become. The vulture crowd did not bestow $20mil (that we know of) on Google for being nice guys.
Take a long look at this scheme of Googles. Many don't think it has anything to do with rating websites Upware, it's about weeding out the small ones that they can't profit from.
>I tend to trust Google too
Why?
- They use 1.6 billion pages of other people content from their site to do a branding job on themselves without prior consent.
- They use everyones graphics with out prior consent.
- They run carefuly crafted "grass roots" marketing campaigns that has even sucked in the likes of even
- The effect of their algo is to promote corporate sites that will have money for advertising.
- They've never once acknowledged, justified, or admitted that the "cache" is may be legally dubious.
So what's to trust? As far as I can see, they are just another corporation out to make a buck on the internet at the small guys expense.
That is how selling positions in search results gives profits. But that is not what we are discussing. The fear is that a voter-rating system will allow spammers to crap up results. Google would not collect revenue from the spammers, and would lose audience (hence lose revenue) if it allowed such abuse.
At least, that is what the article indicates. Read it?
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07