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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.
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.
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
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
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.
- 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.
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
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
Because more likely than not, this would simply reinforce many pages' positions. When I search, I (almost every time) visit at least the first couple hits, unless they're obviously inapplicable.
My only problem with the current implementation is that it's only supported in MSIE. It uses the google toolbar app. If only there were a google toolbar for Mozilla.
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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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!
Maybe OpenDirectory could add a rate-an-editor feature for their users. If you wanna talk about abuse, look there, not to Google.
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.
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...
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...
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.
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?