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Google Unsure About Letting Users Vote On Search
narramissic writes "Google began running a live test last year that lets people rank and remove search engine results and comment on them. Testers were presented with different variations of the experiment, which the company first publicly detailed about two weeks ago in an official blog posting. For example, in one version of the test, people can only remove results, while in another they can append comments that only they can see, said Google software engineer Matt Cutts. But while implementing these features permanently would be a major step for Google in giving more participation to its users, the company remains undecided. 'It's a really fun experiment. I can't say for sure whether it will go live for everybody because we're always running a ton of experiments. Only some of those, the ones that are being very successful, are launched live for everybody,' said Cutts. In the meantime, Google is collecting data that offers some interesting search quality insights."
I'll remove slashdot and Microsoft.
Then your searches will start to resemble the quality of YouTube.
So how about a system with moderation and meta-moderation?
Or has that been done already? =)
-Myke
So with this, I could get even more spam alongside my search results. I've got the feeling that "Ext3nd your pinis at foobar.com" would be a pretty ubiquitous comment.
cogito ergo dubito
Can I have at this? I would so dearly love to have the ability to deep-six the link-farmers that still seem to pervade some searches...but I have to admit that Google has made great strides in quashing most of it in the past year or so.
In other news, astrophysicists have announced that they now know what all that dark matter is: it's stupidity.
would be fine. But I really don't care to see everyone else's search choices. At most I would tolerate a Relevant/Non-Relevant sort of system. But even that would require oversight. I think it would just be too much overhead for Google.
http://transformativeworks.org/
After the Googol-th (10^100th) entry commented "Winged penis !", "MSN is pants !" or "It's the end of the world as we know it !", Google (GOOG) decided that, maybe this wasn't such a brilliant idea after all...
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Or what about nationalism from a very populous country? A website criticizing one of those countries could get voted down in to oblivion - even if it's right.
Just some thoughts at 04:32 EDT.
It overwhelmed TFA servers! /.!!!!
It levels tall buildings!(from #1)
It's faster than a speeding (and frantic IT Team) bullet!
It's
(my apologies to Superman, or is it Souperman?)
If you look for the smoke, it is either failed electronics, or the /. effect, or there is no smoke , and it is your imagination. :)
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
"Smithers, release the astroturfer's"
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
This mechanism would be too exploitable. Why not code bots that would push your own site/agenda/whatever, and wash down all the rest of the results? It's been done before. No amount of clever code protection has ever stopped TEH HAXXORZ (to distinguish from "hackers" ;) ) before. And even if nobody would be up to taming this beast code-wise, we all know how eager people are to solve captchas for money - why not make them :thumb up: your selected result?
I'm sorry Google, i'd prefer to stay with your cold, unfeeling algorithms, that at least give me a good representation of search results.
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams [...]."
Google Unsure About Letting Users Vote On Search
Why don't they put it to a vote?
And if they are not sure if this is a good idea they could put it to a vote
And if they are not sure if this is a good idea they could put it to a vote
And if they are not sure if this is a good idea they could put it to a vote
[Stack Overflow in googlePolicyRules(112)]
This is what http://re.search.wikia.com/ is doing
This idea is the perfect way for corporations and political groups to completely destroy truly representative searches.
Astroturfer groups will bury websites which offer contrary evidence.
Centralized establishments like the MAFIAA, Micro$oft, Big Telecom, the Repugnicrats, and the Demolicans will hire contractors whose job is specifically to stuff the "ballot boxes".
Non profits like the EFF and savetheinternet will disappear into the 9th page, while Fox's latest fabrications will magically make #1 every single time.
Voting on search results: a bad, terrible, horrible idea.
Heck, I'm not even too hot on the fire hose.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I think you'd be better off coding that as a loop instead of recursing.
MP3 Search Engine
How about the ability to flag search results as link farms, ect. Then have Google check them and chuck them if it's the case.
I hate to say it but spam floodgates would open, everyone wants to be at the top of google for certain keywords.
Digg already suffers from a lot of spam (even though there are a lot of interesting things).
There are whole companies dedicated to farming the language space and owning up key domain names and words in search. Search unfortunately has to keep the barbarians at the gate from flooding in. There are too many idiots and nefarious people out there looking to game the system.
Personally I'd like userbased voting only with trusted groups of people - i.e. selected friends, groups, etc.
The solution to their decision problem is trivial.
Make it an option. Sometimes I may want to read comments/... by others, sometimes I may desire the plain dry results.
Please give us the possibility to choose!
A togglable crossbreed between wikipedia and web-searching, yes please!
(Until someone writes a bot to f?ck things up, or does so manually).
That's the idea behind the moderation/meta-moderation above.
If google could have some unbiased way of making the voting fair and protecting the minority without completely ignoring the majority or letting their own opinions get in the way, it'd be great.
Unfortunately, you're right. Democracies don't work well when people are idiots.
If google could find some Godlike way to judge what's what, all the better. And if anyone can figure that out, it's google.
Though, the real question is - who will patent it first.
Most likely 100% or thereabouts of people would agree about what is not related to the topic.
If 1% or 2% of people agreed that something is relevant you would roughly know where to find minority opinions, which could built into the system, i.e. show search results which only between 3% and 5% of people find relevant, this way you would find minority opinions about any given topic.
I wish more people would understand that rating does not equal censorship.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Somalia, being a libertarian paradise
If you discount the Islamic militia and the Islamic Courts Union maybe.
I want to be able to setup a list of site I don't want included in my search and a list of sites to be given higher priority. This would be more much useful for me. Or even a word filter on site names, this way I can cut out a lot of crap when trying to find info.
i have a hard enough time finding technical and scientific articles already, and google has been a great help. the last thing i need to do is search for something like evolution and be presented with nothing but listing after listing of church websites and creationism links.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I don't see what could possibly be improved by giving the same wankers who invented spam, phishing, viruses, worms, trojans, 411 scams, Google-bombs, etc. ad nauseum, influence Google's search results.
I piss off bigots.
to know the search string I wanted was different than the term I entered. That one seems to have been fixed.
Now they want to turn google into a mass of politics , which is what will happen because the next step will be user organizations and in the end, no more net info on making LSD or fireworks....
The two facilities I'd most like to see on Google are the ability to blacklist domains from my results and to either specifically include or exclude merchants from my results.
For the former givemebackmygoogle is a good start as my pet hate are the price comparison cretins or fleabay who return results for just about anything you enter in the search box. Unfortuntately though whilst givemebackmygoogle is all well and good I'd like to maintain my own blacklist.
For the latter it would take something like Google for there to be enough people to flag sites as merchant sites or not. The reason I'd like this requirement is that merchants tend to get pushed up in Google results so it would be really good to be able to exclude them when I'm simply looking for information. Similarly if I'm trying to buy something I'm only interested in merchant sites as I've already done my research and am not interested in sites that aren't selling anything.
Despite it being rather good it can sometimes be a royal pain in the arse trying to find something via Goggle.
As it is I've written my own custom Google search page in PHP which builds a query string then appends a large "-inurl(name1|name2|name3)" directive on the end of it before calling Google.
But it would be nice to have this facility on Google itself. They should like this sort of thing too as by using a custom blacklist they get all that juicy "this individual likes this sort of stuff" profiling crap that advertisers lust after.
Just my tu'ppence worth.
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
It is a knife with two sides. It could improve the quality of results in the search, but otherwise will eliminate many good results that the "masses" for any stupid reason not liked and then remove the results even without merit it. And knowing the humanity, is more likely the second situation.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
I want to be able to put in my own search rules and it remembers it in a cookie on my pc or in my login.
I have a nice long string that eliminates a lot of the garbage that google now includes in searches. The useless patents or fake patents, the damn link sites as well as a raft of other sites that used to be blocked by google but is now included and destroys the signal to noise ratio.
They should allow users to easily report the sites that are BS link farms. to be delisted completely.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Google unsure about letting users comment, remove or remark on pictures? Well they are letting somebody out there manipulate the searches because when I went looking for Demon Cindy McCain pictures -cause you know, she looks like one, I could only find those smiling ones. Heck, I think the McCain campaign even removed the ones where she has black eye liner - cause you know, those are too much like one of those Buffy the Vampire Slayer Demons she looks just like. So, Goggle already is in the tank why not let us vote on it?
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
they obvioulsy are forgetting about 4chan
Plus users get paid.
http://scour.com/
If you like use my invite code.
http://scour.com/invite/mmcguigan/
So now when I search for Image Magick, I'll see only results about Photoshop, because the average idiot knows nothing about scripted image manipulation (including what that phrase means).
When I search for "aptitude", I'll get nothing related to Debian, because the general public doesn't know what a Debian is.
When I search for "ALSA", I'll get nothing about Advanced Linux Sound Architecture, because the general public doesn't know what Linux, Sound Architecture, or even anything truly Advanced is.
When I search fo "BusyBox", I'll get a bunch of answers about toys, because the average idiot doesn't want to know about BusyBox.
The first was off the top of my head - the other three just came from the first page of dpkg -l.
Populist search? Ummm, no thanks. You're doing a great job as is, Google. Please, keep it up. I really don't care that my dipshit neighbor thinks WINE is some kind of fruity alcoholic beverage.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
This is rather a good idea (open to a great disaster, never underestimate human stupidity)however I wouldn't offer that possibility on all websites but maybe the only first three...or the websites hit by the "feeling lucky" buttons.
Totally agrees with a few of you, those search content farms are the most annoying thing, it seems as they are capturing your google search and propose you a rewritted link like "where interested into *processing separated laminated components* for cheap ?" by the way, no useful link or even relation to their *activity*, I never used one of those link search agregators and everytime I stumble upon such kind of crap I close it immediately.
I wonder how many users would remove Experts-exchange.com from the listings. I know I would.
In a heartbeat!
Also, those stupid ad sites which grab any string and claim to have the lowest prices on . (i.e. bizrate.com)
Forget about affecting other people's results--I just want to filter mine. Automatic penalty for some sites, Absolute banning of some sites, and I'd be a happy camper again.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
In which all stories become a subset of:
* LOLcats
* Anti-Republican Activism
* Chicken Soup for the Failure-At-Life's Soul
* Tits (NSFW)
* Funniest Russian Cartoons Evar
I like the idea of Digg and Reddit, but one trip over there and suddenly you'll discover a new love for Slashdot and its moderators.
Anti-Globalism, Traditionalism, and FreeBSD.
With search spam becoming almost as bad as email spam I thought we needed to do this at least 3 years ago. I would like to mark a search result and have it's wording and or domain source from ever showing up again in my search results. Google is starting to become frustrating to use I hate to say it. I've used so many search filters at time and still haven't gotten the web page I know is there because I've had it booked marked. It may be bad for googles bottom line but then they need to be more strict with their customers.
There's an image tagger, for instance. It's a kind of game: Google presents you and a random other person with the same images in sequence. You type in a series of tags, until both of you type the same thing; Google then has two people independently entering the same term, so it knows that tag is valid, and both of you are awarded points towards a high score. Good idea, right?
Well, no. Anonymous put up a list of stock phrases from popular memes on /b/ and exhorted everybody to go and type them into Google in that exact order - and to immediately refresh the page and be re-matched if they didn't get a hit on the first word, in hopes of eventually being matched with another Anonymous. Result: a whole lot of images got tagged 'mudkips' and the top score for the day belonged to someone called 'longcat'.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Or is the love of advertising on social networks an immitation of how The Goog prioritizes search results? If people don't naturally prefer sponsored links, their search votes could cost Goog a lot of money.
If Google uses user comments to affect search, massive attempts would be made by the "search engine optimization" people to game the system. If you thought link farms were bad, phony user farms would be worse. Google won't be able to identify the phonies; they can't even More fundamentally, there's a scaling problem. As I've pointed out before, the number of raters per site has to be large for rating to work. Rating for movies and TV shows works fine. Hotels might get enough ratings to be useful. Joe's Plumbing will be rated only by Joe, Joe's relatives, and Joe's employees.
CustomizeGoogle and GiveMeBackMyGoogle have some good ideas, although GiveMeBackMyGoogle is probably violating Google's terms of service by redistributing Google search results as a web site. Google lets you annotate their search results via their AJAX API, but you're not allowed to add or delete from their results list. If you want to delete items from Google search results, you have to do that via a browser plug-in. (Note, by the way, that Google's Chrome doesn't allow non-Google browser plug-ins. That's a form of DRM, when you think about it.)
With our SiteTruth SiteTruth system, we're addressing the problem by looking at off-web sources of legitimacy. The first question is always "can we find a name and address for the business behind the web site"? We have about four ways to do that. If none of them work, and they're selling something, they get moved down in our search results. If they do have an address, we look them up in various business databases. Considerable data is available about a business, once you can identify it. Ultimately, we want to make the business's credit rating affect their search results. It's necessary to reach out to those hard off-web data sources to separate the real companies from the bottom-feeders. Yes, the "affiliate" crowd will scream. Tough.
As for bottom-feeders, I really like this site, where someone in Brooklyn, NY, took pictures of the storefronts of every Brooklyn photo company he could find that advertised online. It's very funny. Now that's what Google should be doing with StreetView.
Here's our master plan for cleaning up the Web.
This is why Python needs tail recursion.
how to invest, a novice's guide
You forgot
*Ron Paul fap material
*tinfoil-hatter jewsdidwtc YouTube videos
*uninformed blog rants about Windows and Linux
I wish I could filter out expert-exchange.com from all of my google search results. That site is absolutely useless and I hate it when it pops up in results because I generally end up clicking on at least one of them.
grrrrr
IMAGE VERIFICATION IS EVIL!
Apparently, I have pissed off the Mod's from both major parties.
So be it.
Don't like what you hear this time around?...Don't blame me....as far as the turd sandwich or shit casserole, I will search for alternates.
All I will say is this:
THINK and RESEARCH before you vote...it is VITAL! Fsck the partisan modder's. Think for yourselves as individuals, if you are interested in personal freedom.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
"Democracy just gives everyone proportional say, which is flawed. We should not have proportional say, but letting everyone have equal say means that no progress is ever made, as everyone is always at odds with each other. I do not know how to solve this, but that does not mean that the current system is worth continuing."
The solution is states and states' rights.
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
Though their public internet search would struggle due to all the other comments noted, for their corporate customers this would be a great addition. Inside a coprorate intranet, there is deep need to know which documents found are the best to refer to. (For those that didn't know, Google sells their technology to run inside corporate networks for their own internal websites and documents). This addition would reduce the need for adding other Web2.0 tools into a corporation, such as social bookmarking, etc. by helping business' internal users tag the value of the data directly within the search tool.