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.

Moderation/Meta Moderation?

[xanadu113]

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

Or has that been done already? =)

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: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: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: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.