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Google Tests Custom Highlights, Comments In Search
Ian Lamont writes "Google is testing functionality that lets users tinker with query results by re-ranking them and commenting on them. The reason for the commenting feature: 'We're just curious to see how it will be used,' according to a Google engineer quoted in the article. The company has posted screenshots of some of the experiments, which also involve highlighting certain results as well as stems and synonyms within results. Google declined to answer any questions about the experiments, and it's not known whether Google would factor the rearranging of results by users into the overall computation for ranking results for those specific queries. It's also not clear whether search result comments would be made available to anyone to read."
Now I can rank the advertisements lower and comment on sites that pretend to be informational and are nothing but advertising.
Let us completely block certain domains from our personal search results. ExpertSexchange would be first to go.
It seems like google has found out that Yahoo maybe had a point after all when they questioned the ability of algorithms to rank results.
Google has thus far always held that the only way to deal with this problem is automation, I find it really interesting to see them turn around like this and yield to the 'wisdom of the crowds'.
In the end this will probably result in just one more element in their ranking formula, the human factor. I still very much welcome this trend.
Humans are a lot harder to game than algorithms.
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You're helping them tune PageRank by messing with the results which, if you're building a search engine, may not be a good idea to help your competitor.
Hrm, all those masters and Ph.Ds floating around there and the best they can do is "uh... lets ask our customers?" Jesus, they could have paid some hicks @ a gas station in BFE and figured that one out.
I personally find Google's rankings to be terrible, far worse than Yahoo's, and much more likely to have a bunch of spam sites near the top. If they were to integrate results from this project, and if they can keep the spambots from flooding the project with fake rankings, or if they could learn from my submissions that I don't want fake sites with lists of nonsense words as results, they would become a far more powerful than I can imagine.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Google must have noticed what a wonderful contribution the comments on YouTube videos make to the viewing experience. Now they want to bring that level of witty repartee to the internet in general.
(Insert ref to that YouTube comic at xjdk^h^h^h^hxckd^h^h^h^hkxhd^h^h^h^hxjxd^h^h^h^hdamitdamitDAMIT)
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
It could be useful for setting up individual search profiles. For instance, I search for computer stuff all the time, so if I search for "wine" chances are I'm looking for the wine, the windows emulator, rather than the wikipedia article on the difference between red and white wines.
Or another case for me, is I quite often search for hardware reviews before I buy, and prefer reviews of independant sites rather than reviews attached to shops. If I kept promoting independant reviews to the top of my search until google cottoned on and made all my searches looking for reviews work like that... that would be a very positive way of customising individual searches.
Of course, you can look at this as another way to target advertising through google to use more as well.
But in general, I would be in favour of this.
I hope they can use the results to fuel the fire to allow user to block domains or negative rank domain park search pages. Nothing spoils a good search then a pageful of domain parked pages as results.
Thank goodness we'll be able to do that. I love ensuring that people get solid product with good ideas instead of info from who has the most money to spend on their advertising.
And as far as anyone can rate a system the system can also be designed to watch for those people abusing the ratings. Also, over time the system will balance that out.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
I have a feeling that this will be pivotal for web 2.1 - "computing in the crowd"
That said, I'm sure that Google is not giving up on it's automated rankings, but rather looking for a way to implement a new source of page rank value. Strange or not, I think there there is some possibility that this can be beneficial. Knowing Google, they've been working on this for awhile, and it already does something useful. If all they manage to do is positively identify sites that should NOT be on the front page, it would improve results that I get from Google, especially when using complex searches.
If the voting/comments help them identify sites that have risen too high in rank, such information can be used to improve the automation processes. That is what I think they are doing. Crowd-sourcing the manual task of identifying sites that have incorrectly high page rank.
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I doubt Google is dumb. I'm fairly sure they know exactly that people will start pushing their pages, so they will most likely require you to create an account. And behold, they already have that feature with gmail and their other services.
So people will start creating thousands and more accounts to game the results. Google will do what they already do when ranking pages: The "older" you are, the more weight you will have. So pumping a site with a billion new accounts won't do jack when someone with a 5 year old account votes you down.
And so on. Google has already quite a bit of experience with people trying to trick their algorithms, I guess they will have some sort of system at hand to secure themselves against spamsites claiming the top spots.
What I do expect from this, though, is an increase in hack attempts against google accounts...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Technically, we're both wrong. I accidentally wrote "1st" when I should have wrote "3rd". The first person pronoun is genderless, one would simply state "I" or "we."
As to the third person, that depends on a lot of things. In modern, formal English, "he" is the gender neutral pronoun of choice (despite the fact that we Americans seem to disagree for the sake of "not offending"). And while having the subject of the sentence as "one" works well, it does not work in more complicated grammatical context.
For example, the sentence: "If someone were to write a sentence, one should hope that one uses proper grammar." creates many difficulties. Primarily, there is no ability to distinguish between the first and second "one," so it becomes impossible to determine whether it is the hope of the person writing the sentence or the hope of an outside observer. Instead "If someone were to write a sentence, he should hope that he uses proper grammar" has a very clear subject and direct object.
One, if one were to use it as a pronoun, is genderless, yes, but it is also voiceless. The presence of "one" as a pronoun can indicate first, second, or third person depending on the context. Meanwhile, "he" is and always will be relegated to the third person. Thus, "he" is the only truly appropriate third person singular pronoun.
http://www.allen-poole.com/
How about, or is there any way to do the search without the ranking algorithms? My team uses Google for searches during our yearly Trivia contest, but some of our newer players don't know how to work around the algorithms so we don't get a bunch of junk advertisements in our results. Google was great when it first started out, I could simply type in a MS error code and get the exact results I wanted instead of some software company advertising a bundle that will fix all my MS troubles.