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Search Engine Learns From User Feedback
An anonymous reader writes "Ian Clarke, founder of the Freenet project, has set up a web search engine that allows users to rate each of the search results it returns. WhittleBit will use your feedback to determine which keywords should be added or removed from your search, then you can search again to get more accurate results. This could be useful for those cases where Google just refuses to return the search results you want. Could improved interactivity be the next big search engine advancement after Pagerank?"
Great idea until the second month when your local viagra spammer's SEO guy moves all his pages to the top of the search for "Futurama" or "Ninja Turtles."
Ad revenues have nothing to do with the ratings....
All the good search engines end up corrupting themselves (by making money, which I guess is the point of anything...)
If they want people to actually use this, they have to come up with some better way of collecting feedback, that scoring bar that remains on top is very irritating.
Even though google uses PageRank, often sites are higher in the results are only there because they had the right keywords in the title. Sites like this have been tweaked with other similar tricks to score higher. Obviously, this new system would be able to get around this. Perhaps, when joined with Google, this could take over when PageRank fails to be applicable. Then we would have something great!
--- to swing on the spiral...
This will quickly be abused, much like other rating systems like Amazon's book reviews. Anything worthwhile will ultimately be abused, you can be sure of that.
I want THEM to tell ME what the good results are, not the other way around. If I wanted to do that I'd write my own search engine. Don't bring some lame ass solution where I have to do all the work.
[ Don't reply to this ]
who wants to wade through results and rank them? I came here to search!
That's why google is king. It doesn't require you to do *anything*. It barely *allows* you to do anything.
And it still returns what you need.
That's the perfect UI.
Perhaps one reason there were so few result returned is the fact that this seems to be more of a proof of concept than a fully functioning engine. Imagine combining a feedback mechanism with an already excellent search like Google. This can't stand alone, but it would be an excellent addition to an engine that already has a huge index.
One thing that does worry me, what about the potential for abuse. Something like a script that connects to whittlebit, searches by a keyword important to your industry, and gives all of your competitors links thumbs-down.
Where's my lobbyist? Right here.
Web pages are already rated -- by other web pages. Ever noticed these blue underlined chunks of text? They are called links. Each link is a rating that says "Lookie here, I liked it and you might too!" And somebody already uses this rating system in a search engine. Bonus points for correctly guessing who.
People are not changing how the search engine ranks the results for other people, it is just slightly modifying your query to produce more precise results. How can that be abused to make trash sites show up with rank 1?
I think people will start making their websites look better.. and then make other ones look bad (like it's been said in here).
What if i get a list of proxys.. write a program and click on each of the links and rate all of them..
It's easy as that... I don't think it'll work.
All the porn and viagra sites will be #1
Chiefarcher
So how do you deal with trolls and spammers who will vote up or vote down sites for partisan reasons? Or ignoring that, what about straightforward differences of opinion? (The world may be polarized 50/50 between those who think 'firebird' refers to a database and those who think it is a web browser - at least among the geekier-than-average WhittleBit users.)
Anonymous feedback won't scale well to the big bad Internet; some kind of login and network of trust is needed.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
You're missing the point. The system isn't watching user actions while searching to fine tune OTHER user's results, but to fine tune THAT user's results.
While you can certainly claim that one user's actions MIGHT indicate relevance for another user's queries, it's certainly true that if a user gives you a clue that the document you have returned is irrelevant, it must be irrelevant.
Something needs to be done to seperate stories,informative article useful for research and education from the crass commercial websites that are like SPAM on all search engines. Some sort of separation needed. Do something about that and i will be happier. Just type in anything about money or business on all the search engines and you will be flooded with irrelevant links.
While the idea has plenty of problems for use on a general web search engine, it could work very well to tune results on a site's internal search engine, where the user has no vested interest in one result coming up higher than the others, the user only wants good results.
It might also have potential, even if the thumbs up/thumbs down are only shown to trusted users. One of the enduring problems in tuning search engines is that the people who build the search engine aren't the people who know the content best. Getting the content people some way to say "yes, this item should come up higher for this term" is a powerful idea, IMO.