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Google Conducts Trial on User-Voted Search Results

Posted by Zonk on Thu Nov 29, 2007 02:22 PM
from the wisdom-of-the-what-now dept.
Businesses Google The Internet
Grim Reaping writes "A feature in testing at Google Labs allows users to not only prioritize their favorite results, but also move, ignore, and add search results to personalized records of their preferences. The experiment features a simple 'thumbs up' and 'thumbs down' option for each search result; users can also suggest a URL that might be more relevant to their query. 'Other Google users will not be affected by the individual tweaking: instead it will be stored along with the users' own personal information for the next time they search for this word or phrase, so users are required to log in to avail of it.'" The company is also clear on the experiment's page: this feature may never see full release on the site.
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  • MOD LINK UP (Score:3, Funny)

    by noidentity (188756) on Thursday November 29 2007, @02:30PM (#21522389)
    Obligatory.

  • Implications (Score:5, Insightful)

    by explosivejared (1186049) <hagan@jared.gmail@com> on Thursday November 29 2007, @02:32PM (#21522409)
    This will work wonders for their advertising model. You are essentially telling them what you to see advertised right off the bat. I couldn't see why this is a bad idea. I know they say "it may never be fully released," but everything with google is always a beta. Another win-win provided from google. It just goes to show business people everywhere that actually providing a service (ie not harming your customers or trying to milk them) is an extremely effective model for business.
      • Unless they're planning on hacking everyone's account, that's not going to work. It only adjusts personal preferences.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by richlv (778496)
          that might seem like a good idea, but i rarely log in to search for something (that is, i almost never log in).
          but i quite often encounter obsolete pages being in the first spots with actual search targets pushed even to second and further pages - in these i cases i really would like to provide information on which page has the actual information - but this would do little for me as next time i would now what to look for.
          i'd like to give a quick feedback to help other users, but i also understand that such
      • Did you miss the part where they say it's for your *personal* results, not global?
  • Too many searches I make (and Google isn;t the worst about this, in fact they are the least bad) had none of the search terms anywhere on the page that comes up in the search results. Someone (google?) needs a system like this. Hope it works and is implimented!

  • The experiment features a simple 'thumbs up' and 'thumbs down' option for each search result; users can also suggest a URL that might be more relevant to their query. 'Other Google users will not be affected by the individual tweaking: instead it will be stored along with the users' own personal information for the next time they search for this word or phrase, so users are required to log in to avail of it.'"

    That's pretty much what StumbleVIdeo already does and has been doing for years

    • Facebook also recently introduced a thumbs-up/down system in your personalized newsfeed.
      • talking about newsfeeds... freshmeat releases feed is quite cool, but what i _really_ would like to have - an ability to mark specific projects to never be included in my feed. this might also be a generic feed reader capability - to hide certain events by applying regexes to their subjects.
        i wonder how feasible both of these are :)
    • /. should implement something similar for the Firehose. ;-)

  • Reminds me of a 4-panel manga (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Sciros (986030) on Thursday November 29 2007, @02:41PM (#21522567) Journal
    Bob: "Hey Phil you mind telling why Google gives me porn and Youtube videos as the top 10 results for *anything* I type on your computer?"
    Phil: "Heh heh, it is quite bothersome using other peoples' computers , is it not?"
    • Seems like it reminds you of a 2-panel manga.

      Or did you use the fabled [invisible][/invisible] tags for the other two panels? :)

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Sciros (986030)
        Well there's a 4-panel manga called Lucky Star (also an anime now) that has a very similar bit in it (a joke to do with romaji-to-kanji transformation by word processors on JP comps -- specifically homonyms where the best-guess transformation is "learned" by the software from frequency of use). The first two panels in this case would have been 2 successive attempts at a Google search with the results being all porn/Youtube videos. Then my dialogue would have been in panels 3 and 4.
  • What I really want is a personalized filter for all my Google searches. Maybe there is already a way to do this, but I want -site:expertsexchange.com as an argument to every search I do. I don't have an account with them, so I hate it when they appear in search results. And more importantly, I'm only interested in armature sex changes, so I simply never want to see search results from that site.

  • Wait a minute... How is this useful? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SwordsmanLuke (1083699) on Thursday November 29 2007, @02:47PM (#21522651)
    So, you can adjust your personal search results, which are then saved for your use next time... How is this useful? If the search results aren't what I want the first time, I'm not likely to dig through them looking for better links - I'm going to try a different search phrase.

    On top of that, once I find what I'm looking for, I'm either going to bookmark it or forget about it. I'm not going to search on the same keyword/phrase every time I want to visit a website.

    I realize this is just a trial, but seriously, can anyone explain to me how this a good idea?
    • who said anything about the same keyword? imagine that it actually learns about your general preferences and applies that to any other keyword searches.

      • who said anything about the same keyword?
        From TFA: "[The users' adjustments] will be stored along with the users' own personal information for the next time they search for this word or phrase" (Emphasis mine, for the record.)

        If it did actually learn about your preferences, that would be awesome, but such a feature would require an incredibly powerful AI to infer your preferences for future unrelated searches from your changes made.
      • This is something I used to joke about when google was first emerging as the best browser. I would say "Google is so good if you wanted to buy a new Chevrolet you could type car into the search and it would give you a list of Chevrolets. If you wanted to buy a new Ford you could type car into the search and it would give you a list of Fords." This may very well produce that level of "knowning you" (hah i love scare quotes)
    • Well, I've always wanted a way to filter out results from experts-exchange.com. They always show up when I search for something technical. The site might be useful except it costs $$$ to actually get to the answer. My employer certainly isn't going to buy me a subscription so the site is instead a c*ck tease and a waste of time. I would love a way to get them removed from my search results!

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Hunter-Killer (144296)
        The workaround to get at the info on ExEx is to use Google's cached version of the link, and then browse just the cached text.

        Is it wrong to do this? I'd assume ExEx thinks so, as their business model depends on it. However, their links would not appear as often on Google unless they indexed the answer too. It's wrong to offer search engines information, but users less or different stuff (which is why they're hated). Having the info accessible by other means is a price they find willing to accept in order t

    • I realize this is just a trial, but seriously, can anyone explain to me how this a good idea?
      The more you use it, the better it learns what you mean when you type "black rubber strapping" and gives the results appropriate weighting just for you.
       

  • Personal results? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by calebt3 (1098475) on Thursday November 29 2007, @02:54PM (#21522749)

    Other Google users will not be affected by the individual tweaking: instead it will be stored along with the users' own personal information for the next time they search for this word or phrase, so users are required to log in to avail of it
    Wouldn't this defeat the purpose of voting one site a better result than another? Why bother ranking sites when bookmarking the results would achieve the same result (as well as be independent of a login). Actually, a plugin that bookmarks the top ~15 search results automatically might be a useful FF plugin...
    Back on topic: Why not allow a "standard search" or "community-moderated search" toggle switch? The only downside to a community-modded search that I can see in goatse being voted up by hoards of trolls.
    • The way this would work is quite simple: Google classifies all sites. So when you tell it that you like or dislike one site, Google adjusts the weight of the classes to which the site belongs in your profile. When you search, Google uses your personal class weights as one parameter of the ranking algorithm. For example, if you search for "mercedes" and "thumb down" price comparison sites, and then search for "canon", Google won't show you price comparison sites on the first page, even if they are not the sa
    • >> Why bother ranking sites when bookmarking the results would achieve the same result (as well as be independent of a login).

      We're not talking about the same result you get by bookmarking here, but about splitting the results into different sub-domains and having the search system automatically prioritize the sub-domain you search most often.

      For example, if you are always searching for cars and always choose links to fuel-consumption statistics, it would make sense for you to have the statistics resu

    • Why bother ranking sites when bookmarking the results would achieve the same result (as well as be independent of a login).

      What's not clear from the link is whether the promotion is used when you search for the same exact set of keywords, or whether it affects the any searches using any of the terms in the search that matched the particular page. Of course, either does a different thing than a bookmark, though they are something similar to the many web-based bookmark systems. What's particularly odd is t

  • I'd like to see... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by shotgunefx (239460) on Thursday November 29 2007, @03:03PM (#21522879) Journal
    the ability to tell Google "NO" when it suggests alternative phrases. You would think that would be valuable feedback.

  • Hooray (Score:3, Insightful)

    by soxos (614545) on Thursday November 29 2007, @03:05PM (#21522915) Homepage Journal
    No more experts-exchange.com results!!
    • I don't know if you have noticed, but if you get one of those results, and would like to read the actual answers instead of the "register for the answer" masking... just use the google cache link for the page. That is why google lists the result, it sees the answer text and everything. This has always worked for me.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by TheSpoom (715771) *
      You know you can just scroll down to see the answer, right? It's usually about halfway down the page, they just don't want you to know it's there.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Nimey (114278)
        If you click on the cached copy, you can usually see the answers on that site.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by fbartho (840012)
          In addition, the responses are just rot13 in the html source overlayed with a blur jpg. Someone should make a firefox extension or greasemonkey script that decrypts it. Btw isn't it against the rules to feed the googlebot something other than what a user finds?
  • All major search engines use click-throughs as one of the features in their rankers. I.e. if for a certain set of query terms people mostly click on fifth link in the results, this link will soon move up to be the first or second link. Of course, since this is not the only feature in the ranker, there's no "hard" guarantee of that happening, but on average relevant links get boosted pretty heavily that way.

  • Yay! That means it's gonna be even easier to make things like that "miserable failure" meme happen! Now excuse me while I write a script that automatically "mods up" my sites and "mods down" sites I don't like using various anonymous proxies!

    • Yay! That means it's gonna be even easier to make things like that "miserable failure" meme happen!


      Only if you are trying to influence other people who search while they are logged into your Google Account.

  • Now, everyone can finally thumbs-down experts-exchange.com into oblivion.

  • This is obviously a precursor to Google's plan to replace the entire jury system.... with Google Trial! (they'd call it gtrial but that's already trademarked in the Netherlands).

    O.J. Simpson? GUILTY! [googlefight.com]

    Mumia? INNOCENT BY A HAIR! [googlefight.com]

    Slobodan Milosevic, a war criminal? YES INDEED. [googlefight.com]

    And so is President Bush [googlefight.com].
  • Because if they can pull it off, and it grows beyond just an experimental state, they get Yahoo and/or DMOZ quality monitoring of the results in their main searches. Here's why: I don't use Google nearly as much as I used to because folks have figured out how to mess with the results. So where I used to get 100, 200, or 500 results, I am now getting hundreds of thousands, and there is little guarantee that the quality links will be at the top of the list any more.

    So let's assume that millions of eyeballs

    • if SEO's are allowed to thumb up down their competitors' websites, we're in trouble.
      Oh, come on. RTF summary at least. The thumbs up/thumbs down will only affect your own personal search results, and will not be used to affect the results of others. It said that, explicitly, right in the summary!
    • No kidding. This at least will get rid of E x p e r t s E x c h a n g e and p l e n t o f f i s h links for some of us(POF has more gateway pages than any dating site I've ever seen and yet somehow Google does nothing to them). Though they should use the idea to make it much easier to report spam...but that would make too much sense, and also cut into their profits since, sadly, they make a decent chunk of change from the spammers. Kinda like the uncle that paid your way through college, but molested you.

      • This at least will get rid of E x p e r t s E x c h a n g e and p l e n t o f f i s h links for some of us
        I don't know how you engineer a system that remains zero-cost and is immune to manipulation by predators.
        That said, Google does employ some serious headz, so they may be able to avoid having the searches turn into the equivalent of /. mods.
      • Oh God good point.

        If I had a nickel for every time I clicked into experts exchange looking for the answer to some technical problem, only to curse myself for failing to look at the site I was being steered to by my Google search, I'd have, like, $2.55.

        Ok, so I wouldn't retire rich. But still, that site is damned annoying, and any search engine that gives links to ExEx pages without charging them for it has been hoodwinked into giving away free advertising.

      • This at least will get rid of E x p e r t s E x c h a n g e
        ...and there I was, thinking it was E x p e r t S e x C h a n g e.

        I'll get my coat...
    • I had this idea about 3 years ago (yeah I know that doesn't mean anything unless I had acted on it).

      What would be better though is if they had incorporated this in to the Google Toolbar. Who wants to go back in the browser just to vote on the page they just visited. Makes more sense to do it while you are still on the page.
    • It's one thing not to RTFA, but apparently you didn't even read the summary.

      Other Google users will not be affected by the individual tweaking: instead it will be stored along with the users' own personal information for the next time they search for this word or phrase, so users are required to log in to avail of it.

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