Slashdot Mirror
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."
Then your searches will start to resemble the quality of YouTube.
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.
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.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
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.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
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.
MP3 Search Engine
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?