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

[Chrisq]

I'll remove slashdot and Microsoft.

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.

Re:Great

[David Gerard]

Yeah, that's why external links on Wikipedia are nofollowed. SEO spammers screamed blue murder, but Wikipedia's responsibility is to its readers, not to get a third party (SEO spammers) in good with a fourth party (Google). And the spam dropped when we did it.

If you let people vote and comment on searches

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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/.

Moderation/Meta Moderation?

[xanadu113]

So how about a system with moderation and meta-moderation?

Or has that been done already? =)

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.

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.

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:Great.

[onion2k]

I visited foobar.com and it's returning a 403 now. I can only assume it's slashdotted. That says a lot about penis size of slashdotters.

And me, because I went there too.

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?

[topham]

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

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?

[Zerth]

You know that experts-exchange has to be showing google those answers to get indexed. Turn off javascript and then page down all the way to the bottom, past the excessively long "footer". All the text is down there, visible.

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.

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.

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.