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