Google Algorithm Discriminates Against Bad Reviews

If they told you ... by lpaul55 · 2010-12-02 06:25 · Score: 1

then it wouldn't work. (No, they wouldn't have to kill you.)

Almost by definition, they have to keep the details secret. It sounds as though they verified the results empirically and didn't find false positives, but that's all we've got to go on.

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... now back to the bit mines.

Re:If they told you ... by Desler · 2010-12-02 06:28 · Score: 1

Because it's not like anyone has been able to find out how to game Google before, right? Right? Someone will spend plenty of time learning how this works and will use it to destroy people's page rank. This is guaranteed.
Re:If they told you ... by hedwards · 2010-12-02 06:30 · Score: 3, Insightful

Yes, but doing that takes longer than if they're provided with a list of criteria along with a scoring guide. It's not ideal, but it gives more time between adjustments and having to make a new adjustment because somebody has it figured out.
Re:If they told you ... by geekoid · 2010-12-02 06:35 · Score: 3, Insightful

Yes, and in the article they acknowledge people are always trying to game their system. It's very clear that keeping it secret is done to delay gaming the system and to give them time to keep refining it.
Yes, someone will game it. Their response has been very reasonable.

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The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
Re:If they told you ... by corbettw · 2010-12-02 06:48 · Score: 1

I think it's time we had a rating agency for search engines. Something like what Moody's does (or at least is supposed to do) for bonds and what the BBB does for business in general. I'm not sure exactly how one would go about doing that, or what criteria would be selected to govern rankings, but with the number of search engines out there who don't publish their method of ranking things there has to be a way to determine who's system is the most accurate.

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God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Re:If they told you ... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-12-02 06:48 · Score: 0

No, information wants to be free. People shouldn't be able to have secrets; especially corporations. Wikileaks should publish their algorithms.
Re:If they told you ... by mweather · 2010-12-02 06:50 · Score: 1

Most of Google's major algorithms are patented, and thus documented. This is not.
Re:If they told you ... by xmundt · 2010-12-02 06:52 · Score: 1

Greetings and Salutations....
This has been going on for some time. I think it was late last year that I noticed that when I would
do searches for reviews of items (software, hardware, businesses, etc), I would find a LOT of positive
reviews but nothing negative. Since, up to that time, my experience with the Net was that the
only people that really posted serious reviews were the ones who had a bad experience with the
thing.
I cannot say enough about how annoying I find this sort of censorship. It ranks up with the
fact that google has, for years, limited one's search results to the first 1000 or so hits. As I emailed
to them at the time that they implemented this policy, it is not in the commonly traveled paths that
I find the real treasures, but, in the dusty and ignored corners.
visit my blog at http://blog.beemandave.com/

--
YAB - http://blog.beemandave.com/
Re:If they told you ... by ColdWetDog · 2010-12-02 07:04 · Score: 1

I think it's time we had a rating agency for search engines. Something like what Moody's does (or at least is supposed to do) ...
Yeah, like that's worked out really well.

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Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Re:If they told you ... by Posting=!Working · 2010-12-02 07:10 · Score: 2

There is. It's called the market, and they are rated #1. If their results start to suck, then people will switch to a different search engine, as has already happened once.

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This sentence no verb.
Re:If they told you ... by maxume · 2010-12-02 07:35 · Score: 1

It's a real shame for you then, that Google employs all those mercenary strike teams to seek out and destroy other people attempting to create indexes of the internets.
Or not really.

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Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Re:If they told you ... by corbettw · 2010-12-02 07:38 · Score: 1

Markets can only work with information. What I'm thinking about is a way to provide meaningful information to consumers of search engines.

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God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Re:If they told you ... by gstoddart · 2010-12-02 07:39 · Score: 1

No, information wants to be free.
Information doesn't like it when you anthropomorphize it.

People shouldn't be able to have secrets
Oh, the hilarity of posting this as an AC.
What moronic principal makes you arrive at the conclusion that people shouldn't have secrets? Maybe you should post your bank account and PIN if you believe that.

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Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Re:If they told you ... by BobMcD · 2010-12-02 07:56 · Score: 1

Markets can only work with information. What I'm thinking about is a way to provide meaningful information to consumers of search engines.
What information would people be lacking, exactly?
They put a search term in Google and either find what they expected or they do not. Repeat the test with another engine and compare.
This doesn't seem all that difficult to me.
Re:If they told you ... by sleeping143 · 2010-12-02 08:01 · Score: 1

Coca-Cola and Pepsi also both rely on trade secrets to keep their products unique and marketable. Would you have them publish their recipes in the favor of "market transparency"?
Re:If they told you ... by dzfoo · 2010-12-02 08:40 · Score: 1

If Google is providing an answer to a question asked (which is what a query is), then almost by definition the inquiring party does not have the necessary knowledge to judge the validity or accuracy of the response.
Or do you expect that people search in Google only using those terms for which they already know the results?
-dZ.

--
Carol vs. Ghost
...Can you save Christmas?
Re:If they told you ... by commodore64_love · 2010-12-02 08:45 · Score: 1

>>>Markets can only work with information
Yep and it's Our job to spread that information. Complain and moan about lousy businesses via word-of-mouth. I know I've stopped using Google since I learned they've been censoring Google News results of sites they don't like (such as foxnews) and yanking videos they find offensive from youtube (such as the Obama Deception). I'm now categorizing google as almost as bad as Microsoft and switching to Yahoo search as my default.

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"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Re:If they told you ... by BobMcD · 2010-12-02 08:47 · Score: 1

The inquiring party can compare two engines and decide which on they prefer. Nothing else really matters.
Re:If they told you ... by mrops · 2010-12-02 09:20 · Score: 2

I think once a "review" is identified, and they have sucks, a$$h0le.... and a whole lot of other cuss words, its safe to say its a negative review.
Such reviews grouped by percentage vs those that don't have these cuss words would give you if the reviewed entity is bad or good and by how much. Further take these percentages and total count of reviews over a period of time, say per week for the last dozen or so week, normalize against volume trends (e.g. more volume during Chirstmas rush for retailer , you can tell if the entity is improving or becoming worst.
Now this may not be google's algorithm, however mine would look something like that.
Re:If they told you ... by tbannist · 2010-12-02 09:40 · Score: 1

Well, to be honest that seems pretty fair. There's no reason Google News should actually link to fake news sites.

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Fanatically anti-fanatical
Re:If they told you ... by commodore64_love · 2010-12-02 10:09 · Score: 1

Yeah censorship of FOX is definitely the way to go.
Also maybe some attractive new uniforms for the Google staff, with a stylized "SS" on the arm.

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"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Re:If they told you ... by Lally+Singh · 2010-12-02 11:22 · Score: 1

.. Fox isn't going to outrank the AP article they're syndicating. For U.s. political news (where they do their most reporting), they're on news.google.com -- right now, they're on 6 different news items.
As for yanking videos off of youtube, it's the customer base flagging it. You can argue that google shouldn't yank unpopular videos, but people marking it as offensive (or hate speech) is hard to ignore.

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Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
Re:If they told you ... by hairyfeet · 2010-12-02 13:22 · Score: 1

Yeah, uhhh...why would we want that exactly? We had Moody's (which was as rigged as you can get) because picking the wrong stock cost you some serious money and you can't really "try before you buy" in that area. With search engines on the other hand they are all free which means you can try the same search in multiple engines (there are sites such as Dogpile that let you do this from a single site) and go with what works best for you.
Since what works best for you may not work best for me I don't really see how such a rankings system would work anyway. What works best for me is Yahoo Search, thanks to the "more" tab that appears after you run your initial search which makes it easy to find related concepts. Others may not want to check out related concepts and thus may not find it as useful as me. So who would be "right" in that case? And what would be considered a "better" search? One that gave the highest page rank based on links, which as we saw in TFA rewards scammers by giving them higher marks for complaints? Or by whichever filter gave the best results that day?
No in this case it is simply better to give them all a spin once a month or so and decide which works better for you. Fire up all the majors: Ask, Bing, Google, Yahoo, and see which one gives you what you are looking for the most. In a few months spend a few minutes giving them another go just in case someone has come out with a new feature that may appeal to you. It really isn't hard, and only takes a couple of minutes. If someone is so lazy they can't fire up a browser for two minutes every couple of months to have the best search experience then they'll probably be happy with whatever the default is on their box anyway.

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ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Re:If they told you ... by hairyfeet · 2010-12-02 13:33 · Score: 1

Don't know where you get your info friend, but maybe you're just doin it wrong? Because it took me all of four seconds via Google to find the Obama Deception full length on Youtube in your choice of 320 or 240p. I honestly don't see how you could make it easier, unless you want every time someone types in Obama to get "Grrr Socialism!" in which case you just may want to set your home page to Fox that way you won't get any nasty alternative viewpoints.

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ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Re:If they told you ... by Decker-Mage · 2010-12-02 14:02 · Score: 1

With the same attendant problems with the Unemployment numbers, e.g the really disgruntled that don't post a negative review, and/or a company deletes such reviews on their site. Non-reporting and underreporting are the two things that usually bite us in the ass, statistically speaking. I believe Google actually has an easier job that what most econometricians face, namely they are already in the business of scoring items semantically, so determining positive, neutral, and negative reviews should be fairly old hat. Call me weird, although that is distinctly a relative term here, but I'd like to understand how they intend to pull this off since it does overlap a couple of favorite disciplines here.

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"[I]t is a wise man who admits the limits of his knowledge or skill, and that pretending either causes harm." --Terry Go
Re:If they told you ... by commodore64_love · 2010-12-03 01:05 · Score: 1

Well yeah... they restored it after a Lawsuit was filed by the filmmaker (in August).
Otherwise it would not be there; Google's youtube censored it by claiming
"criticisms of the president violate community standards".
I've seen the image of the letter online.
But that's okay. Just blindly believe Google is "the awesome" like those who are fanboys of the Microsoft Monopoly that uses "embrace - extend - exterminate" to eliminate the competition.

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"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Re:If they told you ... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-12-03 02:45 · Score: 0

Considering how you have failed to provide proof that it ever happened in the first place, we will choose to not believe you.
Sucks being on the other end, doesn't it? :)
Re:If they told you ... by tbannist · 2010-12-04 14:14 · Score: 1

If Fox News wants more of their article to be rated higher they should focus on producing quality unbiased reporting.
Of course, since Google News is showing me that they currently have 5,681 Fox News stories indexed I'd have to conclude that they aren't censoring Fox. Of course if you weren't lazy and stupid, you probably could have figured it on your own, instead you fell back to the new default position of conservatives: "Everyone we don't like is a Nazi". Bravo, sir!

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Fanatically anti-fanatical

DecorMyEyes is the 4th result on the 2nd page by digitaldc · 2010-12-02 06:28 · Score: 1

...of google search results for 'discount designer sunglasses'

So is it really 'buried?'

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He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson

Re:DecorMyEyes is the 4th result on the 2nd page by mjperson · 2010-12-02 06:31 · Score: 5, Insightful

That's pretty buried. If I don't see what I'm looking for on the first page of results, I adjust my search terms, I don't click through to the second (of countless) page of results.
Re:DecorMyEyes is the 4th result on the 2nd page by Shikaku · 2010-12-02 06:32 · Score: 3, Informative

It may as well be.
http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2008/04/iprospect-blended-search-study.html
There are studies that says that beyond the first page the majority of people don't bother continuing to search and use more words or different search engines.
Re:DecorMyEyes is the 4th result on the 2nd page by geekoid · 2010-12-02 06:32 · Score: 1

At this time, DecorMyEyes doesn't appear ont he first 4 pages for me. I stopped looking after that.
What we don't know is whether or not it evaluates the bad reviews to good reviews. If I ahve 2000 reviews on line, how big of an impact is 1 bad review? 50? 500?

--
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
Re:DecorMyEyes is the 4th result on the 2nd page by Shikaku · 2010-12-02 06:34 · Score: 1

QED http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1893316&cid=34420638
Re:DecorMyEyes is the 4th result on the 2nd page by digitaldc · 2010-12-02 06:40 · Score: 1

Try it again

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He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Re:DecorMyEyes is the 4th result on the 2nd page by Anonymous Coward · 2010-12-02 06:46 · Score: 0

I see decormyeyes.com on the 2nd page if I copy and paste your exact search terms, with or without the quotes. If I had to guess, I'd say you're logged into your Google account and previously had Googled that site during the recent controversy, causing them to be rated higher in your search results. So I'd suggest that you try it again, but log out first.
Re:DecorMyEyes is the 4th result on the 2nd page by brunes69 · 2010-12-02 06:56 · Score: 1

The fact that results now stream into Google as you scroll down the page makes this finding obsolete.
There is no notion of "page" anymore.
Re:DecorMyEyes is the 4th result on the 2nd page by truthsearch · 2010-12-02 07:09 · Score: 1

You must be thinking of DuckDuckGo. Google still has pagination, even with the "live" searching thing.

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Re:DecorMyEyes is the 4th result on the 2nd page by JackieBrown · 2010-12-02 07:09 · Score: 1

You linked to a comment one comment down?
Thanks
Re:DecorMyEyes is the 4th result on the 2nd page by digitaldc · 2010-12-02 07:17 · Score: 1

I can't remember that far back, but I don't think I searched for it before.

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He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Re:DecorMyEyes is the 4th result on the 2nd page by royallthefourth · 2010-12-02 07:31 · Score: 1

Have you tried image search recently? There's no pagination there anymore.
Re:DecorMyEyes is the 4th result on the 2nd page by vux984 · 2010-12-02 07:32 · Score: 1

Googling for reviews is a nearly worthless endeavor anyway. 90% of the time I just find worthless pages at price aggregators and then countless more worthless reviews that are little more than cut-n-paste of product spec sheets.
Re:DecorMyEyes is the 4th result on the 2nd page by SanityInAnarchy · 2010-12-02 07:36 · Score: 1

True, but pagination is alive and well in the normal Web search.

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Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Re:DecorMyEyes is the 4th result on the 2nd page by Shikaku · 2010-12-02 07:54 · Score: 1

NP mate.
Re:DecorMyEyes is the 4th result on the 2nd page by commodore64_love · 2010-12-02 09:00 · Score: 0

Which is why Google Image now sucks.
It used to be a great way to surf for nude images but not anymore - slow as snails.
Wish I could drop back to the old html page.

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"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Re:DecorMyEyes is the 4th result on the 2nd page by coolmadsi · 2010-12-02 10:31 · Score: 1

If some of the previous results are for other sites saying how rubbish the site is, would people still think its worthwhile to go there?
Re:DecorMyEyes is the 4th result on the 2nd page by nschubach · 2010-12-02 11:06 · Score: 1

Just wait until they figure out how to link to their same comment.

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Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.

Poor summary... by msauve · 2010-12-02 06:30 · Score: 5, Informative

"Google has altered their PageRank algorithm to not give back linking points to bad reviews of websites belonging to online retailers"

Uh, no. Google changed it so that websites of poorly reviewed retailers lose points, not the reviews themselves.

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"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law

Re:Poor summary... by Jugalator · 2010-12-02 06:34 · Score: 1

Thanks, I was pretty confused there for a while after re-reading the sentence three times. :-S

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Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Re:Poor summary... by msauve · 2010-12-02 06:48 · Score: 1

Yeah. The chosen link anchor didn't help, either. It might make you think that kdawson was logged into CmdrTaco's account.

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"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Re:Poor summary... by Daedalon · 2010-12-02 20:51 · Score: 2
To be exact, Google says they did not:
- Block the particular offender, because it would leave all others like it intact
- Use sentiment analysis, because it would discriminate any controversial subject
- Begin to expose user reviews for merchants alongside their search results without affecting the search results.
Instead they developed an "algorithmic solution which detects the merchant from the Times article along with hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide an extremely poor user experience."
Before reading TFA my thought was that they could merely put zero weight on links in reviews claiming negative user experience. But Google's blog post says that was already being done: The review sites' links are rel=nofollow. "Ironically, some of the most reputable links to Decor My Eyes came from mainstream news websites such as the New York Times and Bloomberg."
NY Times article states on page 3 that "Google is intimately familiar with the rage inspired by DecorMyEyes. If you type the company’s name in a Google Shopping search, you’ll see a collection of more than 300 reviews, many of them arias sung in the key of livid." My guess is that they have finally stopped ignoring this information for their search results.
The tricky part is to keep the algorithm not suspect to manipulation by merchants who would write good reviews for themselves and bad for the competition.
Re:Poor summary... by AmiMoJo · 2010-12-03 00:40 · Score: 1

Sounds like exactly what people around here have been calling for - buying decisions driven by how good the product is rather than marketing.

--
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC

Poor Title: discrimination against badly reviewed by rsborg · 2010-12-02 06:31 · Score: 5, Insightful

... not "bad reviews", which would be very anti-consumer.

Instead, the poorly reviewed products and services are going to lose index.

This kind of selective pressure will reward those companies whose services and products garner better reviews.

I just wonder if this will lead to more astroturfed reviews and payola for review-sites like Yelp.

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Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting

Makes sense mathematically by Anonymous Coward · 2010-12-02 06:32 · Score: 0

Bad reviews are 9:1 good reviews as far as effect on corporate/product image. (As much as marketting research numbers can be believed.)

Reading comprehension FTL by gblues · 2010-12-02 06:32 · Score: 2

The blog does not say what the contributor says it does. The closest it comes is noting that the links from the negative reviews never counted in the first place because the sites hosting the reviews used the "rel=nofollow" attribute on the links. What it does say is that they have altered the algorithm to punish bad businesses more effectively in response to the NYT article that suggested that being bad could be good for business.

Move along, nothing to see here!

Simple by CheshireCatCO · 2010-12-02 06:33 · Score: 5, Funny

They look for phrases like

...burst into flames...
...still sobbing for her pet rabbit...
...sucked into the trans-dimensional vortex...
...shouldn't even have been any radioactive material IN a children's book...
...and that's how little Tiffany learned about death and accidental dismemberment...
...came to my home and set it on fire and then kicked my dog...
...never knew I was capable of that sort of pain...
...ordered the complete Beethoven Symphonies and the discs had nothing buy Justin Bieber on them...
..contained a live bobcat... (obligatory)
... would not buy again...

Re:Simple by mikaelwbergene · 2010-12-02 06:52 · Score: 1

Personally I'd love to read any review that combined two or more of those points. ...still sobbing for her pet rabbit... ...burst into flames... ...and that's how little Tiffany learned about death and accidental dismemberment... ... would not buy again...
Re:Simple by Anonymous Coward · 2010-12-02 07:03 · Score: 5, Funny

Great, Slashdot's PageRank just dropped like a rock thanks to you...
Re:Simple by Chapter80 · 2010-12-02 07:19 · Score: 1

I am no algorithm expert, but if I were in charge, I would start with that last phrase that you listed ("would not buy again") along with other similar phrases ("is a scam", "feel completely ripped off", etc). Then I would scan the massive Google database to see if I could find other phrases that are frequently located "near" to those key phrases, and see what I come up with.
I bet I'd come up with a pretty good list of phrases that have negative sentiment. I'd eyeball those, and get rid of the obvious bad ones, and then use the good list(of negative sentiment phrases) to run through the algorithm again. Then eyeball those, and you probably have a good list.
Then I'd use those phrases as my "negative indicators" and implement the same logic as the "rel=nofollow" logic (i.e. you get no google points for those links).
Google, wanna hire me?
Oh wait, we did this already. You liked me for a while.... I aced your goofy interview test. Then what happened?
Re:Simple by TaoPhoenix · 2010-12-02 07:49 · Score: 1

Discussion burst into flames when Ubuntu decided to switch its interface from Gnome to Unity. As a former windows user I went to right click everything in Gnome but none of the features were there. I never knew I was capable of that sort of pain, and one day I was some upset that I came home and kicked my dog. I tried to go online to buy the complete Beethoven Symphonies but in the Gnome copy of my browser it doesn't line up right so I misclicked and ended up with a mashup of music by Justin Bieber set to pictures of Tiffany, still sobbing for her pet rabbit, being contaminated ... there shouldn't even have been any radioactive material IN a children's video.
To console myself I turned on the news whereupon the lead story was how Julian Assange was locked in a cage with a live bobcat and being sucked into the trans dimensional vortex of multinational politics.
Ecuador Likes Julian Assange.

--
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Re:Simple by Anonymous Coward · 2010-12-02 08:15 · Score: 0

No, Google simply instructed GLaDOS to read through reviews for search results and rank higher any pages that she would personally consider purchasing from.
(When you see results featuring unmanned armed vehicles to start being ranked abnormally high, then you should start to really worry.)
Re:Simple by wwfarch · 2010-12-02 09:32 · Score: 1

Did you get to the in person interviews? They work on a unanimous system. Everyone that interviews you has to like you for the position or no hire. I've been through two in person interviews with Google and got filtered out at this stage.
Re:Simple by Chapter80 · 2010-12-02 10:33 · Score: 1

It was a phone screen test. They were going to fly me out to the bay area for the interview - I was definitely interested in a free trip to California.
But I don't think they would have made me an offer to make it worth a move to a much more expensive part of the country.
Re:Simple by DrVomact · 2010-12-02 16:14 · Score: 1

It was a phone screen test. They were going to fly me out to the bay area for the interview - I was definitely interested in a free trip to California.
But I don't think they would have made me an offer to make it worth a move to a much more expensive part of the country.
I used to think the same way, but hasn't that problem more or less been corrected by the recent total reality smack-down? It seems to me that "affordable" and "housing" can once again be used without negation in a sentence that also contains "California". Or maybe all the home-owners there have not yet adjusted to the new realities? Seems to me you could probably get a reasonable deal on a house these days if you shopped around. Of course, there are other negatives to living in California—such as the entire state government being in financial free-fall. And the ridiculous gun laws, of course.

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Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
Re:Simple by hughperkins · 2010-12-02 17:45 · Score: 1

/me wipes coffee off the keyboard.
Re:Simple by Chapter80 · 2010-12-03 00:05 · Score: 1

I used to think the same way, but hasn't that problem more or less been corrected by the recent total reality smack-down? It seems to me that "affordable" and "housing" can once again be used without negation in a sentence that also contains "California".
Oh I don't think so at all.
Based on this site, median house price around my location is $125K, and median house price in the bay area is $585K.
I've found it's not too hard around here to earn over $125K. But I can't imagine Google paying $150K to $200K just to match the local opportunities. Then, add in the cost of living difference, and financially, it would have been too big of a hit.
And stock options? Even in 2005 when I was talking to them, I think the stock option train had already left the station. Sure, the stock's up from 200 to 575 in that timeframe - nothing to sneeze at - but no huge windfall.
And I already did my stint working for a large silicon valley corporate giant. It was so easy to get boxed in creatively, and limited in potential (both in earning potential and opportunities to do something fun). It can be a great first job in someone's career, but not so much fun later in life.
I think it would have been totally exciting to work in Silicon Valley for Google, but it wasn't meant to be. It was just a very weird process when they called me. Sure, I'll talk to anyone about a job if they call. What is there to lose? But I really didn't think it was going to go anywhere, and, well, it didn't.

Am I the only one... by nog_lorp · 2010-12-02 06:33 · Score: 3, Insightful

... who feels like Google results have gotten really, really bad? I know it can come in waves as the SEO arms race progresses, but srsly. I feel like Google's user base has shifted from technical people to the average populace, and so have the results.

Re:Am I the only one... by inputdev · 2010-12-02 06:39 · Score: 5, Funny

have you tried Bing? ;)
Re:Am I the only one... by The+End+Of+Days · 2010-12-02 06:40 · Score: 2

The "technical people" population hasn't driven Google's user base since about 6 months after their inception.
I still normally find what I need on the first page of results in any case, so without knowing what you're looking for... I couldn't say you're doing anything more than typical nerdbitching because they're popular.
Re:Am I the only one... by drinkypoo · 2010-12-02 06:41 · Score: 2

I have definitely observed greater difficulty in googling for pages that I am familiar with containing technical info but whose URL I cannot find at the moment, even when putting the site name into the search terms (With or without site:). On the other hand, I can pretty much ALWAYS find ANYTHING on my OWN site by putting its name (just the name, not even the .org) and a term or two into the google query, which I find interesting. Much of what I can't find is forum or mailing list archives, but of course, some of those come up very well and with high representation (e.g. Ubuntu Forums.)
Of course, Pagerank has to be a secret for it to work, and as long as it's secret I have only very limited interest in trying to figure out how it works. I have discovered that my pages come up pretty often in web searches for related terms, often in the first ten results, and I achieved that by developing content that people want to view, by making my site google-friendly (for example redirecting all aliases to a single URL, google gets upset by duplicate content) and by making lots of links in my content to pages I found useful, which will tend to be pages which also have decent pagerank. Or in other words, I have good pagerank (apparently) simply by being a good internet citizen.

--
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Re:Am I the only one... by corbettw · 2010-12-02 06:56 · Score: 5, Funny

Actually, I've switched the majority of my searching to Bing over the last few months. I've found their results tend to be much more accurate than Google's for the things I search for.
Granted, not everyone out there is searching for transvestite-dwarf wrestling match information, but the way Bing services that niche is impressive.

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God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Re:Am I the only one... by tenchikaibyaku · 2010-12-02 07:01 · Score: 1

I think it's trying to be a bit too smart lately, constantly being "helpful" by searching for what it thinks I want to search for instead of what I actually wanted to search for.

Many times it actually corrects a real spelling mistake of course, the difference might be that when I make a spelling mistake I can only blame myself, but when google corrects something it shouldn't I can blame google..
Re:Am I the only one... by More_Cowbell · 2010-12-02 07:05 · Score: 1

+1. Seriously, I've never even heard ^anyone^ (in person, this excludes places like /.) complain about the quality of results returned by Google (and I live in Silicon Valley, the conversation in the bar turns to tech all the time).
I'm a huge fan, but only because it is the best I've seen. Hell, I used to be a huge fan of hotmail - at one time (way, way long time ago) it was the best free email available...

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Experience teaches only the teachable. -AH
Re:Am I the only one... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-12-02 07:07 · Score: 0

Im not a masochist, so no.
Re:Am I the only one... by 0123456 · 2010-12-02 07:09 · Score: 2

I think it's trying to be a bit too smart lately, constantly being "helpful" by searching for what it thinks I want to search for instead of what I actually wanted to search for.
Bingo. 'Smart' search engines suck, particularly for technical information, because you can never really tell what it's going to search for... the 'smarter' Google searches get, the less useful they become.
Of course it doesn't help when people pick names for their projects or products which are the same as or very close to some other word that's in common usage.
Re:Am I the only one... by vux984 · 2010-12-02 07:43 · Score: 1

I'll complain about them. Finding useful review of something on google is a pain... search for a game...
IGN ... your "ULTIMATE SOURCE FOR news and media"... half the time its a place holder page; I just roll my eyes every time I see that in the search results.
or you get Nextag or Dealtime or any of a dozen other price / review aggregators with a place holder page populated with generated content that was scraped from somewhere else, and then barfed on.
And its the same content on all of them, because they're all scraping off each other.
And then I see amazon.com page, along with the amazon.ca page, and the amazon.co.uk page... one of them is useful... the other copies... not so much.
Re:Am I the only one... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-12-02 07:54 · Score: 0

Informative? Uh? Are people slow on the uptake when it comes to humour?
Re:Am I the only one... by More_Cowbell · 2010-12-02 08:38 · Score: 1

Well, like I said, places like /. are the only times I hear complaints about them... I don't search for games, so I've never had that particular result. Every time I test google against the competition, I'm happier with google... and that is just the results, the appearance of some of them makes me want to puke. Take Yahoo.com for example - bunch of flashy crap and ads that make me feel like I'm surfing in 1995.
As always YMMV, and I really don't care if the whole world does not see things the same way I do, it'd be pretty boring if they did I guess...

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Experience teaches only the teachable. -AH
Re:Am I the only one... by BitwiseX · 2010-12-02 09:34 · Score: 1

Granted, not everyone out there is searching for transvestite-dwarf wrestling match information...
[citation desired]
Re:Am I the only one... by CrashNBrn · 2010-12-02 09:47 · Score: 1

I'll complain too, try searching for something that has a non-alphanumeric character in it. Or put something specific in "quotes" only to have google completely ignore the quotes, strip out numbers or characters you are trying to find and return that result instead.

Or all the times it ignores what I typed completely, "Hey we think you are an idiot, so we searched for FOO instead of BAR, if you really want to search for BAR click here. But we think you want FOO.
Re:Am I the only one... by leenks · 2010-12-02 10:13 · Score: 1

PageRank is well documented, and scores for pages are available (or were) through the Google Toolbar, but you are correct in that to be effective the actual algorithms Google use to rank results need to be fairly closed (to avoid exploitation).
Nowhere in the linked blog post does Google mention PageRank - this is a poor summary.
I've been at technical events where Google engineers have given talks and explained that PageRank is now used for less that 0.1% of all queries. Clearly graph algorithms are still used, but I don't see what the big fascination with PageRank is still - especially given how vulnerable it is to attacks (link farms etc).
Re:Am I the only one... by aiht · 2010-12-02 14:55 · Score: 1

The auto-search-for-something-else behaviour seems like something I would hate... but at least for me, every single time it's happened has been because I had typed the wrong thing.
I'm pretty happy with it.
Mind you, I'm not saying the "did you mean to search for FOO?" is always right - only the "we're so sure that you actually meant FOO that we just went ahead and did it anyway" version.
Re:Am I the only one... by timeOday · 2010-12-02 15:49 · Score: 1

Or, as google puts it: "Today we use more than 200 signals, including PageRank, to order websites, and we update these algorithms on a weekly basis."
Elegant ideas are catchy, but they never hold up for long in the real world.
Re:Am I the only one... by DrVomact · 2010-12-02 16:27 · Score: 1

And then I see amazon.com page, along with the amazon.ca page, and the amazon.co.uk page... one of them is useful... the other copies... not so much.
You lost me on that last one. Which site did you find useful? Why only one? I often order books from UK Amazon that haven't been published here in the US of A. I even order from amazon.de, because I read German. You think Amazon should consolidate all its localized stores into one huge site? That strikes me as having some obvious problems—like turning up a lot of book search results that are in languages you can't read.

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Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
Re:Am I the only one... by epine · 2010-12-02 19:34 · Score: 1

Yes, I have to agree that occasionally Google sucks the hind banana. Electronic data sheets is one area. There are a bunch of squatter sites trying to sell you what a better search result set would have provided for free at the top of the list. For a while I had a feature on Google where I could zap these nasties, but the nasty zapper went away. Without notification. Poof.
There are a few search areas where I'm going to give Blekko a spin. Google is not good at accommodating certain personal preferences, such as my severe distaste for data sheet squatter archives.
And don't get me started on the disaster of searching for health information on the supplement SAMe or the programming language R. Yeah, one can use r-seek. It's a bit of a pain.
If blekko lets me type /R and gives me good results, Google will lose a slice of my action.
Google is cheating on this one. What they need is a way to signal that a search result is highly controversial, rather than arbitrarily deciding whether to bury it or not. I guess attributes are problematic for Google, because they are too easily traced back to the algorithm behind them.
There's a niche here for an alternative search engine whose business model is not so intensely linked to the secrecy of their algorithms. Maybe that's what Blekko is trying to do.
Some niche computer languages are excellent precisely because the ugly mega-industrial languages such as C, C++, PERL, and FORTRAN handle the worst of the toxic waste. It's less difficult to be wonderful when a language is not under the gun to be all things to all nightmares.
I'm looking forward to small spin-offs content to function under the giant shadow. Alpha and Blekko are the first two I've seen with any personal appeal.
Re:Am I the only one... by vux984 · 2010-12-03 07:11 · Score: 1

Which site did you find useful? Why only one?
Finding the amazon.uk.co page, the amazon.ca page, and the amazon.com page *for the same product* isn't useful.
If I'm in Canada, and the product isn't available from amazon in canada, than sure the US page is still relevant. (I can't order it from amazon.com, but the information about the product and reviews is useful...)
But since the reviews and information is the same, I don't need multiple results each from different amazon.com sites in my search results.
You think Amazon should consolidate all its localized stores into one huge site?
No. I think google should only show me one amazon result for a given product. If its in my country use that one. If its not, use one of the other same language countries.
Indeed, I'd like this to apply to my search results in general, across domains. If a bunch of sites are just copy-pasta of each other, I don't need all of them.
Penalize news aggregators that add no additional content, and just return the source.
I'm ok with an aggregator or review site that HAS a lot of REAL comments, AND there is actual healthy discussion on the page. But the same news article or product page on 147 aggregator domains all with "Be the First to Comment" or "Be the first to review" has no value.

False reviews by Todd+Knarr · 2010-12-02 06:34 · Score: 2

One hopes the guys at Google took into account the business that sets up a fake review site for the purpose of posting negative reviews of competitors to get Google to falsely downgrade them. My bet's on a manual filter to remove such sites, probably based on a discrepancy between those sites and every other review site.

Re:False reviews by CheshireCatCO · 2010-12-02 06:42 · Score: 1

Wouldn't that be similar to (and perhaps offset by) people already doing them same with favorable reviews for themselves? It doesn't seem like a new problem, anyway.
Re:False reviews by The+End+Of+Days · 2010-12-02 06:48 · Score: 1

Google can't really solve the problem of shifty retailers or stupid customers. Both are as old as commerce, and both will persist until we all live in utopia.
Re:False reviews by dzfoo · 2010-12-02 08:53 · Score: 1

Ah, Utopia, the memories. Have to watch out for those insurgents. If you're not careful, they'll take over the school and hospital. Oh, and the hurricanes! I say always plant your crops on the west side, so you don't lose them.
-dZ.

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Carol vs. Ghost
...Can you save Christmas?
Re:False reviews by kevinNCSU · 2010-12-02 09:20 · Score: 1

My understanding is that this would not affect results at all. What they are doing is no longer giving points to a site because a negative review linked to that page in the review. Before the change if you wrote a review that said "You should not buy a book from Amazon because their books in particular are absolutely terrible an no one should go there!" Then Amazon's page rank for the keyword "book" would get a bump from the back-link to it. If you think about it this doesn't really make sense as you'd be rewarding Amazon for negative reviews, hence the change.
So writing a site full of negative reviews would cause all the back-links to just get completely ignored and there would be no change to anyone's page rank.

Re:Poor Title: discrimination against badly review by Desler · 2010-12-02 06:35 · Score: 2

This kind of selective pressure will reward those companies who can afford to pay people to destroy the page ranking of their competitors.

FTFY.

Haha by mr100percent · 2010-12-02 06:35 · Score: 0

Cue Vitaly Borker doing his Darth Vader impersonation; "Noooooooooooooo!"

Oh yeah watch this: by kwabbles · 2010-12-02 06:36 · Score: 3, Funny

Google is the worst company ever. They sold out and went evil. I give their company a poor review and personal rating.

.
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good great wonderful cheese love flowers butterflies excited appealing chocolate yay amazing cool googlicious

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Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.

Re:Oh yeah watch this: by kevinNCSU · 2010-12-02 09:24 · Score: 1

I think you're missing the idea of what a back link is.
Re:Oh yeah watch this: by Anonymous Coward · 2010-12-02 10:09 · Score: 0

I think you're missing the point. It's not like Google was going to hide your review because its negative. The only thing you've done is managed to trick Google into giving pagerank to whatever your slamming. Good job, I guess.

Re:Poor Title: discrimination against badly review by gstoddart · 2010-12-02 06:38 · Score: 1

I just wonder if this will lead to more astroturfed reviews and payola for review-sites like Yelp.

Safe bet ... as they say in the article, people are trying to game Google rankings constantly ... if there's money to be had, someone will keep trying.

--
Lost at C:>. Found at C.

The Reson this happened? Bad Press. by acomj · 2010-12-02 06:39 · Score: 3, Informative

Its a long interesting read.
Quite the character mr. Borker is.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/business/28borker.html

Re:The Reson this happened? Bad Press. by Anonymous Coward · 2010-12-02 10:26 · Score: 0

Yep, it would be nice if the folks at 4chan took notice of him.

Re:Poor Title: discrimination against badly review by Monkeedude1212 · 2010-12-02 06:43 · Score: 1

Your point would have been better accepted (to me anyways) if you hadn't used the "Fixed that For ya" meme -

But yes, I fear this won't encourage more positive reviews but only more negative reviews between competitors.

Perhaps it will eventually reach a point where competitors will push each other into the dirt with bad reviews and a completely unreviewed product will be the one with the highest rank.

"I'm a technical boy." by blair1q · 2010-12-02 06:46 · Score: 1

You have to wonder if Mr. Borker is familiar with that phrase.

New search engine time? by CaptainNerdCave · 2010-12-02 06:47 · Score: 0

Will you be the first to start a new search engine for the technical? www.1337-$34R(|-|.com?

Re:Poor Title: discrimination against badly review by rsborg · 2010-12-02 06:49 · Score: 3, Insightful

This kind of selective pressure will reward those companies who can afford to pay people to destroy the page ranking of their competitors.

FTFY.

I thought about that but the article states that

an algorithmic solution which detects the merchant from the Times article along with hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide an extremely poor user experience

.. I presume this means that the weighting would not be linear, but more like an exponential dropoff when reviews are numerous, time-disjoint, and all negative. I'm sure Google has done at least a sample analysis using their mountain of data. I think the biggest point made here is that (as a vendor) services to monitor your product/service will become increasingly important so you can reply to negative reviews and actively manage any trolls... whether this leads to more engagement or simply more astroturfing is yet to be seen.

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Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting

I have used by geekoid · 2010-12-02 06:51 · Score: 1

bad reviews return to make decisions about company..namely not to use them.

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The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

As per the NY times article by Lord+Byron+II · 2010-12-02 06:55 · Score: 1

How do we know that all of the "Barack Obama sucks" websites out there won't make it harder to search for the White House? Just one example of where semantic inclusion may not work.

Re:As per the NY times article by blueg3 · 2010-12-02 07:07 · Score: 1

That would be sentiment analysis, which TFA specifically mentions they don't use because of exactly the problem you describe.
Re:As per the NY times article by maxwell+demon · 2010-12-02 08:12 · Score: 1

However, if they are not careful they might get an antitrust law suite from Microsoft because Microsoft products don't show up any more ;-)

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The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Re:As per the NY times article by timeOday · 2010-12-02 15:54 · Score: 1

How do we know (X) about google's search results?
General answer: you don't. How would you propose to know anything about the quality of anybody's search results? Did you think you understood google's algorithms before? You didn't.
So it all comes back to: how well does it find things you already know are there, how well does it line up with other (presumably unrelated) engines' results, etc, etc. But it's not like there's an objective answer to the question of what the first hit for "shopping" should be (nor any other search).

Crappy Summary by Jaysyn · 2010-12-02 06:57 · Score: 1

Article submitter sounds like a SEO moron suffering from a case of sour grapes.

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There is a war going on for your mind.

Re:Crappy Summary by Anonymous Coward · 2010-12-02 07:15 · Score: 0

So you don't mind Google deciding what you see in search results, based on what it decides is a "good" or "bad" website based on a set of secret arbitrary rules? Sound a bit big brother-ish to you?
Re:Crappy Summary by InfiniteWisdom · 2010-12-02 08:22 · Score: 1

How is that different than what they do now? Would you prefer if they showed you all million pages that contained a set of keywords in random order?
Re:Crappy Summary by Anonymous Coward · 2010-12-02 09:08 · Score: 0

So you don't mind Google deciding what you see in search results, based on what it decides is a "good" or "bad" website based on a set of secret arbitrary rules? Sound a bit big brother-ish to you?
No it's only a problem with someone deciding what is good and bad for you when it is Apple and the app store.
Re:Crappy Summary by aiht · 2010-12-02 15:02 · Score: 1

So you don't mind Google deciding what you see in search results, based on what it decides is a "good" or "bad" website based on a set of secret arbitrary rules? Sound a bit big brother-ish to you?
No, I don't mind.
That's the service I use them for.
I'm not willing to look at all the websites myself to make my own judgement, and Google have given me enough good results in the past that I'm inclined to believe them. If that changes, I may stop using their service. Simple.

Secret by Anonymous Coward · 2010-12-02 06:59 · Score: 0

The specific changes to the algorithm are of course a guarded secret.

Then...

how do we know how the algorithm determines a bad review from a good one, and whether or not innocent online retailers will be wrongly punished by having their rankings downgraded?

Er, you don't. That's on account of their being a closely guarded secret.

Google is a private company, not some utopian public service. Sheesh!

XKCD: Constructive by Anonymous Coward · 2010-12-02 06:59 · Score: 0

http://xkcd.com/810/

Reification by Lilith's+Heart-shape · 2010-12-02 07:03 · Score: 2

You are guilty of reification. Information does not want to be free. Information does not want anything, because information is not a conscious entity capable of thought, desire, or volition. Treating abstract concepts as though they had thoughts, needs, or desires is faulty logic.

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I write sci-fi for metalheads

Re:Reification by DJRumpy · 2010-12-02 07:32 · Score: 0

It doesn't matter how they spin this. People should be able to trust Google to provide accurate information, good or bad, when doing a search on an entity. The fact that they filter out the 'bad' for paying customers is egregious, and damages their reputation. The search should be unbiased. No exceptions.
Re:Reification by gstoddart · 2010-12-02 07:45 · Score: 2

The search should be unbiased. No exceptions.
A Google search has never been un-biased, and never would have worked if it were.
The whole point about the way Google ranks pages is to try to ascertain which pages people actually find useful ... so, initially when it came out, it was finding useful hits when Yahoo had become pretty much a degenerate case of a search engine retrieving everything but what you want. Every bloody search returned crap because the SEO wankers had polluted the indices with junk -- you used to hit a page with 400K of keywords in the meta tag, and absolutely nothing to do with what you searched for.
Google has always tried to find the best sites to retrieve, not the crap. By that very definition, Google was never un-biased. And, after a decade of using them as my search engine, I want them to keep up the good work and continue to filter out the crap. Weeding out shady marketers are something that I applaud them for doing.

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Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Re:Reification by DJRumpy · 2010-12-02 07:53 · Score: 1

I didn't specify 'useful', but rather 'unbiased'. if someone is searching on the reliability of a vendor, then they will want to see all results (good or bad), while getting actual results about vendors. The two are not mutually exclusive. If, however, Google gets results back that are exactly what the user is looking for, but only presents results that are favorable to the vendor, than that is biased data.
Do not confuse unbiased with 'useful'.
Re:Reification by gstoddart · 2010-12-02 07:59 · Score: 1

If, however, Google gets results back that are exactly what the user is looking for, but only presents results that are favorable to the vendor, than that is biased data.
Which, is exactly the opposite of what they're doing.
They're not giving page-rank boosts to companies getting getting crappy reviews.
I'm pretty sure they're not selling the ability to move up the ranking to shitty vendors. They're making sure the users only see "good" data.
Biased towards being useful. Much better than completely unbiased, or biased towards crap.

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Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Re:Reification by Mister+Whirly · 2010-12-02 08:03 · Score: 1

That would work just fine if Google didn't also have a ranking system. As anyone can plainly see now, an "unbiased" system can and does reward bad merchants unfairly. A completely unbiased and unfiltered system would really leave things wide open for all kinds of gaming the system. Google will put useful over unbiased every time as that is what the majority of their customers actually want.

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"But this one goes to 11!"
Re:Reification by DJRumpy · 2010-12-02 08:09 · Score: 1

If a user searches for the reliability of an example company called 'widget company' and the 'widget company' happens to be a google customer, and along comes joe user searching for data on widget company, and if Google has a search result for widget company (both good and bad ratings by customers), that it's not being unbiased if they present only the good customer reviews?
I don't think you understand the meaning of the word unbiased.
This isn't' about return 'valid' search result, but about Google removing unflattering search results for it's customers who pay for advertising. In the case reference in TFA, it was about a company that found that even if it gave horrible customer support, they found it generated hits for their website. In that case, it's up to the consumer to evaluate what they search for, rather than seeing a name on the first hit result, and then never reading it.

Instead, in the last few days we developed an algorithmic solution which detects the merchant from the Times article along with hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide an extremely poor user experience. The algorithm we incorporated into our search rankings represents an initial solution to this issue, and Google users are now getting a better experience as a result.
They are in effect censoring the returned results based on a 'blacklist' of 'bad' vendors.
Re:Reification by ultranova · 2010-12-02 08:23 · Score: 2

You are guilty of reification. Information does not want to be free. Information does not want anything, because information is not a conscious entity capable of thought, desire, or volition. Treating abstract concepts as though they had thoughts, needs, or desires is faulty logic.

Heat wants to flow from hot to cold. Gasses and fluids want to flow from high pressure to low pressure. Electrons want to go away from negative charges and towards positive charges. Systems want to go to their minimum energy state. Information wants to be free.
These are all expressions that treat very abstract concepts as if they had desires. This is a mental trick that allows human brains to use its hardware-accelerated social simulation circuits rather than the general-purpose abstract thought circuits to predict how a system will behave.
Personification is simply a way of getting the most out of your brains. It's no more illogical than using any other optimization tricks. Of course it has pitfalls and you need to remember that concepts are not really thinking entities, but it often works amazingly well.

--
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Re:Reification by commodore64_love · 2010-12-02 08:54 · Score: 1

>>> The fact that they filter out the 'bad' for paying customers is egregious
What on earth are you talking about? Google's not damaging customers. They are demoting bad businesses like "DecorMyEyes" that sold counterfeit glasses, and therefore stole $450 from a customer. The really sad part of the story is that the customer disputed the charge, but the store owner called Citi Bank, pretended to be the customer, and said to close the dispute. Citi complied and then refused to reopen it. This fraud was one scam on top of another scam on top of another scam.
And he used to be google-ranked #1.
But not anymore.
Good for google.

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"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Re:Reification by tbannist · 2010-12-02 09:36 · Score: 1

Frankly, I think you're jumping to conclusions. They said they developed an algorithmic solution, so it's not a blacklist and they said they didn't use sentiment analysis to penalize web sites. What I would guess they did was use sentiment analysis to negate the value of a link just like it was a "nofollow" link. It'd be hard to game that solution because you can already do it in a much simpler fashion, and it accomplishes the goal: ie. prevent bad reviews from boosting a site's page rank.

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Fanatically anti-fanatical
Re:Reification by DJRumpy · 2010-12-02 09:42 · Score: 1

From TFA:

Instead, in the last few days we developed an algorithmic solution which detects the merchant from the Times article along with hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide an extremely poor user experience. The algorithm we incorporated into our search rankings represents an initial solution to this issue, and Google users are now getting a better experience as a result.
Re:Reification by nelsonal · 2010-12-02 11:00 · Score: 1

The article was about a merchant who is talked about (almost entirely in exceedingly negative reviews) online a lot. Previously more reviews meant the google algorithm decided people were interested, enough that this site was above the, much larger and more useful links, from manufacturers of the products they, resold. In essense their version of SEO, was to be recklessly fraudulent because it meant a host of negative reviews, that google interpreted as interest.

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Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Re:Reification by Anonymous Coward · 2010-12-02 11:17 · Score: 0

You're correct but you're missing the GP's point, which is that the GGP (obviously a different AC than me) was trying to apply the anthropomorphization of an abstract concept in a literal sense in order to artificially inflate a moral claim, rather than as a mental shortcut as you describe.
Re:Reification by Lilith's+Heart-shape · 2010-12-02 13:09 · Score: 1

The proper place for personification is in literature. Used elsewhere, it is a logical fallacy. If you have spent so much time developing your social skills that your ability to engage in abstract thought suffers, then I think you have failed as a human being.

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I write sci-fi for metalheads
Re:Reification by aiht · 2010-12-02 14:39 · Score: 1

I believe you're misunderstanding the direction they're taking this.
It sounds like you think Google is hiding bad reviews in their search results.
The way I read the summary (of course, not TFA :P) is that they now detect bad reviews, not to hide them, but so that if they contain links to a company's website then that company does not get a high page score for having lots of bad reviews and thus lots of links.
Google are backing up the individuals who write bad reviews, not the companies who are on the receiving end.
I don't see how the "customers who pay for advertising" come into it at all.
Re:Reification by aiht · 2010-12-02 14:45 · Score: 1

This is a mental trick that allows human brains to use its hardware-accelerated social simulation circuits rather than the general-purpose abstract thought circuits to predict how a system will behave.
Thank you sir, that GPU analogy appeals to me and I will be appropriating it and using it forthwith! :D
Analogies want to be free!
Re:Reification by DrVomact · 2010-12-02 15:43 · Score: 1

I do believe that comments gets you a "whoosh" award. The OP was being sarcastic. The proposition that "people shouldn't be allowed to have secrets" could not possibly have been meant seriously. Perhaps you should count to ten before you deploy the large caliber rhetorical artillery.

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Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
Re:Reification by DrVomact · 2010-12-02 16:05 · Score: 2

Heat wants to flow from hot to cold. Gasses and fluids want to flow from high pressure to low pressure. Electrons want to go away from negative charges and towards positive charges. Systems want to go to their minimum energy state. Information wants to be free.
You forgot Aristotle's observation that objects want to fall to the ground. Such statements only become seriously problematic if they are proffered as explanations of natural phenomena—as was the case with Aristotle; otherwise, they are merely cute or redundant.

These are all expressions that treat very abstract concepts as if they had desires. This is a mental trick that allows human brains to use its hardware-accelerated social simulation circuits rather than the general-purpose abstract thought circuits to predict how a system will behave.
Personification is simply a way of getting the most out of your brains. It's no more illogical than using any other optimization tricks. Of course it has pitfalls and you need to remember that concepts are not really thinking entities, but it often works amazingly well.
Your last two paragraphs appear to be complete blather. "Hardware-accelerated social simulation circuits": zero meaning. "Personification is simply a way of getting the most out of your brains": do you write self-improvement books? When I want to get the most out of my brain, I eat chocolate. Personifying it...man that could be dangerous.
Pinky: "Gee, Brain, what do you want to do tonight?"
The Brain: "The same thing we do every night, Pinky—try to take over the world!"
(For more information, please consult this reference.)

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Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
Re:Reification by flowwolf · 2010-12-02 17:02 · Score: 1

The algorithm doesn't only count links. It looks for keywords across lots of similar pages. In this case, people were talking about brand name products quite a bit. If you searched for this company directly, all of the fraudulent behaviors were apparent. The review sites were all over the place in the results. If you searched for a brand name product; since there was much discussion regarding his site and those products, link provided or not; those key word combinations would be favored and his site would rank higher if you searched for the brand names. This was the keyword ranking vulnerability he exploited. He was suckering people who never heard of his business yet. It was very very schemy. If Google has bias towards these kind of merchants, then they have done no wrong. The entire reason they're used by everyone is because this has been, is and always will be how they develop their algorithm.

Google has specified guidelines that webmasters should follow if they want to be ranked. If a vendor wishes to do business by means of pagerank on google, then they must follow those rules. If they don't want to do that, there are other models that they can pursue.
Re:Reification by ultranova · 2010-12-02 21:24 · Score: 1

Your last two paragraphs appear to be complete blather. "Hardware-accelerated social simulation circuits": zero meaning.

The meaning is obvious: Because you are a human, and humans are social animals, you have neural circuits related to solving the associated problems, namely predicting how other humans behave, just like you have neural circuits for parsing incoming sensory data. Contrast this to circuits relating to abstract thought, where the actual thought is separated from the underlaying hardware through several layers of abstraction.
"Personification is simply a way of getting the most out of your brains": do you write self-improvement books?
No. Should I?

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Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Re:Reification by ultranova · 2010-12-02 22:09 · Score: 1

The proper place for personification is in literature. Used elsewhere, it is a logical fallacy.

Your link states (emphasis mine): "the use of reification in logical arguments is usually regarded as a fallacy."
Reading comprehension is a slick, supple thing that dances away just as you thought you'd caught it, and sticks its tongue out on you. Case it as you will, but its firm yet supple metaphorical buttocks stay always out of your grasp and perky figurative breasts bounce delightfully yet frustratingly just out of reach. Never will you wake up in the morning and see the beautiful anthropomorphic personification of an abstract concept sleep besides you, still tired from an orgy of understanding, strong yet fragile and easily hurt in the hands of literary-minded jerks.

If you have spent so much time developing your social skills that your ability to engage in abstract thought suffers, then I think you have failed as a human being.

As I stated, reification is a tool that helps abstract thought by translating the problem into a form the human brain can solve more efficiently. Social skills have nothing to do with it.
But I guess the concept of optimization is too abstract for you, you failure.

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Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Re:Reification by Massacrifice · 2010-12-03 06:28 · Score: 1

Your last two paragraphs appear to be complete blather. "Hardware-accelerated social simulation circuits": zero meaning.
I'm sorry, but this made perfect sense to me. Maybe YOU are not allowing your brain to work with physical abstractions as if they were living entities, but some of us do, and it's a quite effective modeling tool, as the GP was trying to demonstrate.
Now whether "information wants to be free" as much "heat wants to flow from hot to cold" is certainly discussable, as information is somewhat more shifty concept than energy, but there is definite tendency for it to replicate and propagate, given the right medium. DNA strands, human knowledge...

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-- Home is where you eat your heart out.
Re:Reification by DrVomact · 2010-12-03 20:40 · Score: 1

Your last two paragraphs appear to be complete blather. "Hardware-accelerated social simulation circuits": zero meaning.
I'm sorry, but this made perfect sense to me. Maybe YOU are not allowing your brain to work with physical abstractions as if they were living entities, but some of us do, and it's a quite effective modeling tool, as the GP was trying to demonstrate.
With regard to the first sentence, I'm happy you feel that you understood something. As for the remainder of what I quoted, it makes no more sense than that which you claim to have understood.

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Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary

Left out my line by gurps_npc · 2010-12-02 07:06 · Score: 2

I tried to post this earlier (guess I was too slow). But, considering that Google specifically said they would be looking into this later, that means: In the (paraphrased) words of Coots and Gillespie: They are making a list, And checking it twice; gonna find out who's naughty and nice"

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excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com

Re:Poor Title: discrimination against badly review by RandCraw · 2010-12-02 07:07 · Score: 1

If Google's change does what's intended, downrank URLs of merchants who invite furious web opinion as a marketing ploy to game search engines, only the losers, like bile-thriving DecorMyEyes' Vitaly Borker will seek alternative means of self promotion. Frankly, I suspect that's a pretty small contingent of potential astroturfers -- 'hundreds' according to the Google blog.

I suspect that Google has indeed applied Sentiment Analysis, but done so narrowly, targeting only (1)merchants described with (2)domain-specific epithets and phrases from (3)buyers who are unhappy.

BTW, here's the link to today's NYT article. It and Sunday's original article are an worthwhile read.

I wonder how well that works with sarcasm. by JRHelgeson · 2010-12-02 07:07 · Score: 1

I wonder how well that algorithm works with sarcasm.

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Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.

Re:I wonder how well that works with sarcasm. by Anonymous Coward · 2010-12-02 07:15 · Score: 0

Signal to noise ratio.
Re:I wonder how well that works with sarcasm. by Anonymous Coward · 2010-12-02 11:41 · Score: 0

It probably sucks.
Re:I wonder how well that works with sarcasm. by DrVomact · 2010-12-02 16:46 · Score: 1

I wonder how well that algorithm works with sarcasm.
Didn't you read TFA? Google has sentiment analysis. Sarcasm is (arguably) a sentiment, so this should be no problem whatsoever for Google. Now if only /. would make a <sentiment analysis="label_sarcasm" color="purple"/> option available to its often humor-challenged readers, perhaps there would be fewer of those awkward whoosh experiences.

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Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary

Terrible summary by blueg3 · 2010-12-02 07:11 · Score: 1

TFA specifically indicates that they don't do something as straightforward as is described (which would be sentiment analysis). Instead, they implemented some algorithm that lowers the ranking of some merchant websites that, according to them, provide a poor user experience. No further details on how their algorithm behaves are given. It doesn't even indicate that people giving poor reviews of the merchant or website factor in to the ranking change at all. (The only part where this comes in to play is their mention that many websites hosting reviews use rel=nofollow to avoid promoting any linked-to websites, which is preexisting behavior.)

I feel so terribly guilty now... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · 2010-12-02 07:14 · Score: 3, Funny

I wrote my favorite escort a glowing review, all about how much and how hard she sucks, and now google is going to downrank her and it will be all my fault! This is terrible...

On a more serious note, correctly assigning "positive" or "negative" to a given adjective or phrase, across a wide range of subject areas, must actually be something that would give the computational linguists a bit of trouble(or 10,000 interns a very boring time of it)... Simply parsing star ratings or "out of 10" is easy enough; but is a vacuum cleaner that sucks good or bad?

Re:I feel so terribly guilty now... by maxume · 2010-12-02 07:42 · Score: 1

It doesn't have to be perfect to be better than what they were doing yesterday (especially when their metric doesn't necessarily include being entirely fair to all internet stores, they only care about keeping search traffic up).

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Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Re:I feel so terribly guilty now... by DrVomact · 2010-12-02 17:06 · Score: 1

On a more serious note, correctly assigning "positive" or "negative" to a given adjective or phrase, across a wide range of subject areas, must actually be something that would give the computational linguists a bit of trouble(or 10,000 interns a very boring time of it)... Simply parsing star ratings or "out of 10" is easy enough; but is a vacuum cleaner that sucks good or bad?
Y e e e e e s...the problem would seem to be quite complex; I'm surprised that this is the first time I've heard of Google's breakthrough in "sentiment analysis". I would have thought that a breakthrough of this magnitude would be announced on the front pages of all newspapers across the globe in font four inches high: "Google Solves Mankind's Communications Problems Forever". I knew these guys were really, really smart, but wow...I had no idea. I want to kiss the hem of their collective robe. From now on, you can just toss some ill-considered words onto /., and Google will make sense of them for you ! Employing the miracles of sentiment analysis, Google knows what you really intended to say! I'm sure that real soon now, there will be an SA button by every Google search result, and if you click it, you will not see the original text as posted, but what the writer was really trying to say! That, ladies and gentlemen, is progress.

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Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary

Automatically generated review bots. by countertrolling · 2010-12-02 07:16 · Score: 1

Battling algorithms This will be fun to watch.

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For justice, we must go to Don Corleone

Badly written negative reviews are useful. by azdio · 2010-12-02 07:16 · Score: 1

I hope it does not also cause anyone to miss those negative reviews that have horrible writing errors and flawed arguments. Those can sometimes help the product maker.

Google can do what they want. by Posting=!Working · 2010-12-02 07:36 · Score: 1

Why is everyone acting like page ranking should be anything but whatever Google wants them to be? They are free to use whatever they wish to determine the search results. If they decide to never show Hotmail when you search for email, there is absolutely nothing wrong, ethically or legally, with this. They are free to shun a competitor. They are free to put you last on every search if they just simply don't like you. They can put whatever they want into the search results, in whatever order they wish, with whatever advertisements they want, and it is legally and morally fine.

If their results start to suck, then people will switch to a different search engine, as has already happened once. There are dozens of competitors, any one of which will gladly take Google's place as the top search engine. The market will decide. The only possible result of these "investigations" is the government stepping in and telling a website not only what it must link to, but the order it must link them in, and that's just not a sane proposition. Every site that isn't first of second in the results would jump on that bandwagon. Search engines would become nearly useless, returning crappy sites who were the last to sue before the ones we'd want to see.

Has everyone forgotten that Yahoo used to be number 1, with more market share than Google has now? That they lost the #1 spot because Google's results were better? That all of this was a result of word of mouth? Why is there a sudden assumption that this couldn't happen again?

Search results should, and really must, be whatever the company provides them wishes them to be. The consequences of anything else lead to an internet you would not want to be on.

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This sentence no verb.

Re:Google can do what they want. by DrVomact · 2010-12-02 17:55 · Score: 1

Why is everyone acting like page ranking should be anything but whatever Google wants them to be? They are free to use whatever they wish to determine the search results. If they decide to never show Hotmail when you search for email, there is absolutely nothing wrong, ethically or legally, with this. They are free to shun a competitor. They are free to put you last on every search if they just simply don't like you. They can put whatever they want into the search results, in whatever order they wish, with whatever advertisements they want, and it is legally and morally fine.
If their results start to suck, then people will switch to a different search engine, as has already happened once. There are dozens of competitors...
You make a good point. If a search engine starts to fail conspicuously, or another search engine performs noticeably better, then—given a level playing field—the better product will eventually dominate the market. But what if search results are skewed in a more subtle way? What if a search engine seems to give the kind of results you think you want, but those results are just a bit distorted? Would we even notice?
The people who run Google—the world's biggest and most popular source of information—are subject to some very powerful temptations. One temptation is simply money: Google is an advertising company, not a search engine company. Many people seem to think that Google's big breakthrough was to design a search engine that works really well. I remember going from the tedious boolean searches of Alta Vista to Google, and finding that not only did I get far better search results, but I didn't even need boolean logic—all I had to do was to enter a phrase, and Google would give me what I wanted. I was impressed; their search engine was (and is) damn good. But Google's real breakthrough was that it figured out how to make the Web profitable, and they are still far and away the best in their field. (Do they even have real competitors?) Given that Google's primary interest is in making money through their advertising (and indirectly, in making money for their clients), can we really depend on their integrity to prevent them from diddling with their search engine to skew the results just a bit to give a slight edge to their advertising interests? It seems to me that there is a conflict of interest between providing honest neutral search results and making money through advertising that is affected by those results. Maybe Google is the only company in the world that is led and staffed by people who are not only brilliant, but incorruptible as well. Is that possible? Sure. But it's not the way to bet.
There's another possibility also—one that bothers me from time to time, but I keep dismissing it as sheer paranoia. What if the people at Google decided to Do Good? Like everyone else, they know what the Good is...but they are in a unique position to advance the cause of the Good. If you run the world's premier information source, and you want to influence people's opinions—for Good, of course!— would you not do Good? I think I'd better leave that line of thought as an exercise for the reader.

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Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary

Google and its gullible users are still a problem by soonerthanuthink · 2010-12-02 07:40 · Score: 1

Google and its gullible users are still a problem.

And what's to prevent retailers from burying competitors by posting smack about them, or paying SEO companies to post smack about them, now that Google makes a (naive) attempt to evaluate semantics?

Google autocorrect can be disabled by achurch · 2010-12-02 07:42 · Score: 1

Append "&nfpr=1" to the search URL. If you use keyworded bookmarks in Mozilla: http://www.google.com/search?q=%s&nfpr=1

and will this affect the reviews? by Anonymous Coward · 2010-12-02 07:45 · Score: 0

how do we know reviewers won't start giving positive reviews so that the reviews themselves get better rankings?

Why "crowdsourcing" doesn't work by Animats · 2010-12-02 07:50 · Score: 4, Interesting

This is the fundamental problem with "crowdsourcing" reviews. Where the number of reviewers is large compared to the number of items being reviewed, as with movies, it works fine. Where the ratio is small, it doesn't. It's far too easy to game the system. There are automated tools for that.

This problem has become worse since the October 27th change to Google, when Google Places/Maps results were merged into web search. This made "local" results much more prominent. Look at the first screen of Google search results for a local product or service. Most of what you see are Google Places results, maps, or ads. The organic results are so far down they don't matter.

As a result, the "black hat" SEO companies are now aggressively targeting Google's places and maps system. "Convert Offline" is quite open about this, with their article Dominating Google Maps- The Most Effective Spam Ever And What You Can Learn From It" In some ways, Google Places is more vulnerable to attack than organic search. The number of web mentions of a local business tends to be small, so the amount of phony material that has to be generated to make a business look good is also small. Each mention carries a lot of weight.

Google might lose this battle. Craigslist did. Back in 2008, Cory Doctorow wrote about "Spammers discuss breaking Craigslist verification system". It's become much worse since then. Personals were the first to go, and are now over 90% spam. Then Computer Services and Self Employment fell to the spammers. Jobs and Real Estate are under attack. Along the way, Gmail became a spam haven, especially after Jiffy Gmail Email Creator became widely used.

The fundamental design assumption of Google is that important stuff has lots of links to it. That's not a valid assumption in local search.

Re:Why "crowdsourcing" doesn't work by soonerthanuthink · 2010-12-02 07:57 · Score: 1

The fundamental design assumption of Google is that important stuff has lots of links to it.

Very good point... this has worked against retailers, will work against location-based search, and is also working against victims of CIA experimentation - the worst, looniest sites are at the top of the search results because people find them easy targets of ridicule or satire.

Could the solution be.... by pokerdan · 2010-12-02 07:58 · Score: 1

Perhaps they found a way of linking with Better Business Bureau search results?

'Decor My Eyes', the company in question from the article, has a BBB rating of F with nearly 300 complaints. The blog specifically states they are not using Sentiment Analysis. Seems like the best alternative, in my opinion.

Re:Poor Title: discrimination against badly review by zeroshade · 2010-12-02 08:09 · Score: 1

Except as the google blog post stated, negative reviews don't harm the company's site, they just don't get positive boosts and credit from it.

Essentially before, both positive and negative reviews helped and counted, now only positive reviews help and count. This doesn't allow other companies to destroy other's page rank.

hmm... you may got something there... by excelsior_gr · 2010-12-02 08:25 · Score: 1

About 11,700,000 results * burst into flames
2 results (all Slashdot) * still sobbing for her pet rabbit
3 results (two Slashdot) * sucked into the trans-dimensional vortex
2 results (all Slashdot) * shouldn't even have been any radioactive material IN a children's book
2 results (all Slashdot) * and that's how little Tiffany learned about death and accidental dismemberment
3 results (all Slashdot) * came to my home and set it on fire and then kicked my dog
2 results (all Slashdot) * never knew I was capable of that sort of pain... This was disappointing...
2 results (all Slashdot) * ordered the complete Beethoven Symphonies and the discs had nothing buy Justin Bieber on them
6 results (one Slashdot) * contained a live bobcat... c'mon only 6?
About 3,780,000 results * would not buy again

Re:hmm... you may got something there... by CheshireCatCO · 2010-12-02 08:35 · Score: 1

6 results (one Slashdot) * contained a live bobcat... c'mon only 6?
I'm a bit shocked. I mean, I bungled the quote slightly (I think mine is better in context), but still.

Re:Google and its gullible users are still a probl by canajin56 · 2010-12-02 08:44 · Score: 1

And what's to prevent retailers from burying competitors by posting smack about them, or paying SEO companies to post smack about them, now that Google makes a (naive) attempt to evaluate semantics?

Google has altered their PageRank algorithm to not give back linking points to bad reviews

Any other questions that could be answered by reading even just the first half of the first sentence in the summary?

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ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI

Why do you care? by loshwomp · 2010-12-02 08:56 · Score: 1

The specific changes to the algorithm are of course a guarded secret. So [...] how do we know how the algorithm determines a bad review from a good one

I think you pretty much answered that one yourself.

Old style image search... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-12-02 09:04 · Score: 1

As soon as the first scrolling image search page loads, scroll really fast to the very bottom. There's a link there to switch to the "basic version". :-)

Re:Poor Title: discrimination against badly review by xero314 · 2010-12-02 09:35 · Score: 1

How can a competitor utilize poor reviews to destroy their competitor when Google is ignoring links from poor reviews. The positive reviews will still boost the page ranking while poor reviews, rightful or astroturf, will be ignored. So yes their competitor could create bad reviews that Google will ignore, but that seems like a big waste when they could just write no reviews and Google can ignore those as well. At worst some of those bad reviews would get included in the page ranking and actually improve the position of their competitor.

Clearly you don't understand what this change does, and you just want to make wild claims that are completely invalid.

Re:Poor Title: discrimination against badly review by xero314 · 2010-12-02 09:40 · Score: 1

The whole point of the Google change is to not include bad reviews in the page ranking. I actually means that you can't destroy a competitor with bad reviews because those bad reviews will not affect page ranking. Previously both bad and good reviews increased the page ranking. This caused products that where poorly reviewed to be at the top of the page rankings. Now it will take more positive reviews to move to the top of the page ranking, while negative reviews will have no affect on the page ranking at all.

Now this does not stop a competitor from creating negative reviews and increasing the page ranking of the review it self so it shows up above the actual product in the rankings, but that's nothing new with this change, that possibility has always been there.

This just stops all the links from [yourproduct]sux.com from actually making your product show up higher in the page rankings.

Re:Poor Title: discrimination against badly review by bonch · 2010-12-02 10:52 · Score: 1

I just wonder if this will lead to more astroturfed reviews and payola for review-sites like Yelp.

Well, of course it will.

By the way, double-spacing every sentence is annoying to read.

Don't you think?

Does this affect the "santorum" ranking? by Shandalar · 2010-12-02 11:38 · Score: 1

I wonder whether this will affect the rankings that appear when you google "santorum". The google bomb has been a sort of bad review of the guy, after all.

Subject by Legion303 · 2010-12-02 13:08 · Score: 1

Speaking of Vitaly Borker, the cocksucker from the NYT link:

http://brooklyn.blockshopper.com/property/3087270008/56_beaumont_street/
718-332-1226

He says to call anytime, day or night (seriously, I'm not trolling here). Loves his job, I guess.

Prairie Web Companion? by bobdevine · 2010-12-02 13:43 · Score: 1

I would have preferred a sentiment indicator instead of a simple filter. If only good reviews are searchable, does that mean every one listed as a search result will "above average". Seems like this will lead to more confusion and mistaken belief that Google curates the web instead of just presenting it, warts and all.

I wonder if this will affect movie reviews. Hey! Why can't I find "Ishtar" anymore?

Re:Poor summary... Does it make more sense by hellop2 · 2010-12-03 00:17 · Score: 0

like this?

"Google has altered their PageRank algorithm to not give back linking points for bad reviews of websites belonging to online retailers"

Either way it was obvious to me what they meant considering the recent article about negative reviews getting high pagerank last week: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/11/28/135220/No-Press-Is-Bad-Press-Even-Online

Maybe try not to be such a grammar nazi, asshole.

j/k love ya bro

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How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?

Re:Poor summary... Does it make more sense by hellop2 · 2010-12-03 00:19 · Score: 2

Actually, it's kind of interesting how that article went up and then less than a week later Google changed their entire algorithm.... affecting millions of people. It's like they're reading Slashdot's mind man.... trippy.

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How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?

Re:Poor summary... Does it make more sense by Anonymous Coward · 2010-12-03 02:32 · Score: 0

No it doesn't, dickwad, because that's not what Google's doing, either. Read the article before putting your head up your ass.

Also, the headline matches the incorrect claim, and Google isn't "discriminating against bad reviews."

blogspot is gaming the system! by Sloppy · 2010-12-03 02:48 · Score: 2

I had the same problem. I didn't understand WTF the summary was saying, so I had to RTFA.

Hey, wait a minute. googleblog.blogspot.com is gaming the system to get more pageviews, by getting people to post bad summaries to Slashdot!

Slashdot's editorbot should use the coherency engine on summaries, and if the summary doesn't make sense or has too much non-humorous ambiguity, it should penalize the linked articles.

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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.

Inception? by Anonymous Coward · 2010-12-03 04:38 · Score: 0

How do you know that you're really finding what you need on the first page?
Maybe you need to go deeper.

Re:Poor summary... Does it make more sense by hellop2 · 2010-12-03 08:18 · Score: 1

read the what?

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Google Algorithm Discriminates Against Bad Reviews

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