Slashdot Mirror
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.
Now the spammers can pay people in ${ThirdWorldNation}
to rate advertisements higher and comment favorably
on them
>;k
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.
MP3 Search Engine
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.
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.
...the stupidity of the crowd.
If slashdot is any indicator of mass stupidity, the would-be-spammer are going to be buried under an even more overwhelming amount of comments of doubtful usefulness.
Like "yes" "no" "omg" "lol" "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" "goodluckwiththat"
and "ponies"....
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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)
I can start commenting/modding search results as "+5 Informative" or "-1 Off-topic!"
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
...the stupidity of the crowd.
If slashdot is any indicator of mass stupidity, the would-be-spammer are going to be buried under an even more overwhelming amount of comments of doubtful usefulness.
Like "yes" "no" "omg" "lol" "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" "goodluckwiththat" and "ponies"....
So, we're to expect microsoft.com to be rated negative one hundred billion and Apple to be rated plus one hundred billion?
Comments? From people? On the Internet?
Does Google have a line on a new revenue stream that involves harvesting every known variant on "CHAD IS TEH GAY!!!1!"?
Never approach a vast undertaking with a half-vast plan.
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
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.
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
I was studying for a certification test and had a CD for TransCender practice tests sitting on my desk. My girlfriend at the time gave me the weirdest look and asked, "Why do you have a Transgender DVD on your desk?"
A better question: Why were you dating someone who couldn't even READ?
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.
You can get a firefox extension to do this already folks :) It lets you list certain domains to block from results. (google returns full results, the extn uses regex I think to filter before showing the result set to you.
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.
This is what I thought until I looked more closely. EE definitely seems to serve different pages to GoogleBot, and appears to serve different pages to people referred directly from Google. I believe this is a distinct violation of Google's listing policy, and to be consistent with how they treat all the other website operators Google should be immediately de-listing Experts Exchange until it serves identical pages to Google as what it serves to everyone.
Try installing User Agent Switcher in Firefox, then browse to this URL. If it's like me, you'll get no comments at the bottom, but as soon as you switch to mimicing GoogleBot, you'll get a heap of responses.
EE is definitely serving different pages to people referred directly from Google. Try clicking through to a result from Google and you'll get the comments at the bottom. If you open a blank tab, though, and paste the same URL into that tab, you won't get the responses (unless you're pretending to be GoogleBot again). This is definitely what happens for me, anyway.
There's also something weird happening in the Related Solutions section of EE pages, which is probably to do with EE giving Google different URLs to crawl. eg. Take a look at the "Related Solutions" section of this page on EE, and look closely at the URLs. (I reached this EE page using the top result of the Google search that someone pointed out elsewhere in the thread.)
When I look at the URLs in the Related Solutions section, they all point to what first looks like static HTML, but with "?eeSearch=true" appended to the end of the URLs. If I then go to the Google Cache edition, it looks similar but doesn't pass the eeSearch=true parameter.
I'm not sure what effect this has because with or without appending '?eeSearch=true', I still get the same behaviour which is to show comments on the page if I'm pretending to be GoogleBot, and not show them if I'm not. It's almost certainly something to do with tricking Google, probably to make Google think that they're static HTML pages when they're actually not.