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."

Comments

Sweet!

[BitterOldGUy]

Now I can rank the advertisements lower and comment on sites that pretend to be informational and are nothing but advertising.

How about this --

[mingot]

Let us completely block certain domains from our personal search results. ExpertSexchange would be first to go.

Re:How about this --

[Anonymous Coward]

to bump up AmateurSexChange?

Re:How about this --

[jacquesm]

what bugs me most is the sites that clone forum questions, load them up with ads and recycle them so that if you type in a question in to google one of these sites will come up with a perfect match but there is no answer or follow up to the question.

Not Sweet

[Mad Bad Rabbit]

Now the spammers can pay people in ${ThirdWorldNation}
to rate advertisements higher and comment favorably
on them

Re:Not Sweet

[uchian]

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.

If it does influence rank will people game it?

[alvinrod]

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.

Re:Rating....

[darkpixel2k]

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.

Awesome. Google will finally have mods and metamods.

Finally my website can be rated -1 TROLL