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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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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 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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