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

Great.

[gamanimatron]

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.

Re:Please please pretty please?

[topham]

You realize the link-farmers would figure out how to use this to their advantage, right?

Filtering my own results

[Aerynvala]

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.

Re:Filtering my own results

[Firehed]

Well god knows they have enough data on the entire world to implement ranking in a way that's weighted towards users similar to you (whether they've got people with the data mining skills to produce that kind of thing is another story - they're brilliant, but that's some damn tricky work). If was a simple vote-up/vote-down system, they could just use their existing organic results and maybe tint the background either slightly red or green for results that users tend to find less or more helpful (maybe using time-on-site data from their pool of analytics would be better, as pre-click votes are worthless and most people wouldn't go back to rank them after the fact).

If they can't automate it, they won't do it. IIRC there was some post a while back about them tweaking The Algorithm something like 3000 times a year, but they never blacklist sites or rankings by hand. These days it's probably as much for DMCA protection as anything else, but introducing a human element (that exists only within Google) is a bad idea for bias alone, never mind the actual labor overhead.

I'd say that it remains an interesting exercise, but should probably stay as such. I don't think all of the data mining in the world could successfully counter the collective stupidity of the human race.

Flagging but not voting?

[SeaFox]

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.

Spam floodgates /w voted search

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:If you let people vote and comment on searches

[moteyalpha]

It might be better to have an algorithm that could be incorporated into the search. I could write a simple xml file that was like a grep template that took the attributes of the information and its content and applied it before I even get my search results. If they are doing the search anyway I could upload a parametric that was a list of things I don't want or prefer in the result pages. The search algorithms themselves could be searched for one that suited a person's interests. If they like fluff and magic then filter it that way. I am sure that most people would not like the choices that /.ers would make as we would have search results that contained hexadecimal, binary or octal humor ( 101 ). Things like word length and word variability could be a possible discriminating factor. I like reading about "hadrons", but other people may prefer something that causes "hadrons" s/dr/rd/.

Re:Please please pretty please?

[tepples]

as well as frequently disguising their "buy" link (often having it as an image).

If a store's "buy" link has no alternate text, try leaving a comment that it is not accessible to customers with blindness or certain other disabilities. Then watch the PR people squirm in the reply.

I'd like a personal blacklist

[TractorBarry]

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.

Re:Humanity groupthink?

[pcgabe]

90%+ of the human population believes in a God.

Are you American (and therefore assume the rest of the world is as religious as Americans are)? Or are you proposing a hypothetical situation?

Nowhere near 90% of the human population believes in a God. I lived in Japan for three years, worked in a school with thousands of people. In three years I met a total of two (2) people that believed in God.

Hey, maybe that's just Japan, or just that part of Japan, or just that school, anecdotal evidence and sample-size and all that.