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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."
If people are actually able to make an impact on the page rank for different sites, how long until we see some websites trying to game the system. It's already possible for you to buy a front page spot on Digg for a few hundred dollars.
Google makes it fairly obvious which results are paid for at the moment, but if this system were to be implemented it wouldn't be as easy to decide if that number one search result is there due to Google's search algorithms or because the site owner paid some company to bump it up and leave dozens of positive comments. Of course the reverse is also possible where a competitor's website is bumped down the list and filled with comments about how bad or unhelpful the website was. In some cases you wouldn't even need to pay someone to do it. Any fairly large group with an agenda would be capable of unbalancing things.
The only redeeming feature is that this is a Google product and will probably be in beta for the next few decades. By then I'll be more worried about the kids on my lawn than my Google search results.
Humans are a lot harder to game than algorithms.
I disagree, or else the marketing industry would not exists. Algorithms can be made to become pragmatic and change over the course of use. While humans can do the same, they also have emotions. I fully expect this to give rise to a new paradigm in marketing strategy.
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What about just randomly giving registered Google users 5 mod points. Then up to 5 results in a search can be moded up or down depending on what the user prefers. Might work. ;-)
-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+ *** http://www.mountainfort.com *** +-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-
Let me put in my prefs a list that always get's added to my searches...
-patent is a big one that will get rid of a crapload of garbage results. I'd like that one on by default forever.
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One thing I wish I had control over was the "Did you mean:" function. I'd like to be able to answer the question yes or no, rather than having to go into the query and putting quote marks where I want to search for a word it thinks is spelled wrong. It might do Google's algorithm some good, too, if they can get feedback on their suggestions. I would also like the option to ask for additional suggestions, especially on multi-word queries.
What would be nice is for Google to add white and blacklists to our personal search settings.
I think the commenting could be helpful if you could set up communities too. For instance, a group of python enthusiasts could see comments by other python enthusiasts. It could really reduce the blogspam if the group kept spammers out, or even kept spammer numbers low.
How to do that though, I am not sure.
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