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."

Comments

If you let people vote and comment on searches

[Anonymous Coward]

Then your searches will start to resemble the quality of YouTube.

Please please pretty please?

[mudshark]

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.

Re:Please please pretty please?

[onion2k]

By doing this Google get a bunch of data that their competitors have no access to meaning search quality stops being about your algorithm design and starts being about the size of your userbase, something Google will win hands down at the moment. It'll be great for removing spam like you suggest, it'll probably improve the rankings for proper results too, but in the long term all it will do is cement Google's position as the number one player unless someone manages to figure out a search algorithm that's better than a bunch of humans - that's a little unlikely.

Perhaps once it's been running for a while Google won't need to improve their algorithms at all. Hell, they could probably abandon them completely and move to a human-moderated index.

Re:Please please pretty please?

[pla]

I would so dearly love to have the ability to deep-six the link-farmers that still seem to pervade some searches

Nevermind link farmers, I'd like to get rid of the million and one storefronts that top the list when searching for any sort of product information (whether or not they actually carry that product, oddly enough).

Once upon a time, you could add a few keywords to filter them out (like "review -buy -price"), but the stores seem to have caught on and always have a (usually blank) review section, as well as frequently disguising their "buy" link (often having it as an image). Not quite spam, but the same idea applies - Do these stores really think that if they can just trick me into visiting them, I'll buy something there?

Re:Please please pretty please?

[purpledinoz]

I would really like the ability to vote down some search results. Every time I look for reviews for a product, 80% of the results are just stores.

Re:Please please pretty please?

[kniLnamiJ-neB]

That, and the ability to save the parameters I put on a search. Every time I google the contents of an error message, I get these stupid tech forums that you have to pay to join and they won't let you see the replies to any of the questions until you're a member. If I could add "-experts-exchange" to the end of every google search I did automatically, I'd be a very happy person.

Re:Moderation/Meta Moderation?

[BitterOldGUy]

Then whole internet would look like Digg. Anything showing Obama in a positive light would be mod'ed to +100 billion and anything showing him in a negative light would be -100 billion. In other words the internet would be even flakier then it is now. As it is, Fox News seams more balanced than most websites these days.

Humanity groupthink?

[BitterOldGUy]

If websites were voted on, I'm wondering if the web will turn into one giant human group think. The folks who are fringe would be buried into oblivion. Not so bad? What about atheists? 90%+ of the human population believes in a God. 5.6+ billion votes for God, 400 million against.

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.

Re:Humanity groupthink?

[goose-incarnated]

I agree.

Pure democracy is tyranny of the minority by the majority. Democracy without limits is never a good idea.

Re:Humanity groupthink?

[Anonymous Coward]

That is as true a statement as they come. What happened to inalienable rights? They never said, "inalienable unless a whole lot of people agree," it was phrased that way for a reason. (now I go a bit off subject) government, or anyone for that matter, can not change my rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Re:Moderation/Meta Moderation?

[Firehed]

Most websites don't even try pretending to be "fair and balanced". Though in Digg's case, it's really just demographics at work since it's entirely user-submitted crap. Slashdot is at the very least editor-skimmed, user-submitted crap (and a significantly wider age demographic, which often shows when the odd non-tech political argument comes up - this is obviously a giant echo chamber for tech politics).

Just consider... Digg's BitterOldGuy is probably 24.

Too exploitable

[Xtense]

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.

Re:Great

[jacquesm]

In a nutshell, that's the problem with any of these wetware additions to algorithms, they introduce a new element that can be gamed. If enough people do that (and the incentive is very large, a whole 'SEO' industry has jumped up around gaming the system) then the end result is negative.

Google is well aware of this and I think it is one of their main reasons for being very cautious about giving this any 'weight' in their search results.

Block Sites from Search List

[DoChEx]

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'll pass on it.

[nimbius]

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.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

[EWAdams]

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.