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Google Tests Custom Highlights, Comments In Search
Posted by
timothy
on Wed Aug 27, 2008 11:21 AM
from the humans-err-good dept.
from the humans-err-good dept.
Ian Lamont writes "Google is testing functionality that lets users tinker with query results by re-ranking them and commenting on them. The reason for the commenting feature: 'We're just curious to see how it will be used,' according to a Google engineer quoted in the article. The company has posted screenshots of some of the experiments, which also involve highlighting certain results as well as stems and synonyms within results. Google declined to answer any questions about the experiments, and it's not known whether Google would factor the rearranging of results by users into the overall computation for ranking results for those specific queries. It's also not clear whether search result comments would be made available to anyone to read."
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Sweet! (Score:5, Insightful)
Not Sweet (Score:5, Funny)
Now the spammers can pay people in ${ThirdWorldNation}
to rate advertisements higher and comment favorably
on them
Parent
Do not underestimate... (Score:5, Funny)
...the stupidity of the crowd.
If slashdot is any indicator of mass stupidity, the would-be-spammer are going to be buried under an even more overwhelming amount of comments of doubtful usefulness.
Like "yes" "no" "omg" "lol" "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" "goodluckwiththat"
and "ponies"....
Parent
Rating.... (Score:4, Funny)
...the stupidity of the crowd.
If slashdot is any indicator of mass stupidity, the would-be-spammer are going to be buried under an even more overwhelming amount of comments of doubtful usefulness.
Like "yes" "no" "omg" "lol" "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" "goodluckwiththat" and "ponies"....
So, we're to expect microsoft.com to be rated negative one hundred billion and Apple to be rated plus one hundred billion?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Thank goodness we'll be able to do that. I love ensuring that people get solid product with good ideas instead of info from who has the most money to spend on their advertising.
And as far as anyone can rate a system the system can also be designed to watch for those people abusing the ratings. Also, over time the system will balance that out.
Re:Rating.... (Score:5, Funny)
And as far as anyone can rate a system the system can also be designed to watch for those people abusing the ratings. Also, over time the system will balance that out.
Awesome. Google will finally have mods and metamods.
Finally my website can be rated -1 TROLL
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Fine by me. lolcats is still infinitely preferable to any "parked" domain that masquerades as a search engine or offers dubious products or services.
Re:Do not underestimate... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Not Sweet (Score:5, Insightful)
Or another case for me, is I quite often search for hardware reviews before I buy, and prefer reviews of independant sites rather than reviews attached to shops. If I kept promoting independant reviews to the top of my search until google cottoned on and made all my searches looking for reviews work like that... that would be a very positive way of customising individual searches.
Of course, you can look at this as another way to target advertising through google to use more as well.
But in general, I would be in favour of this.
Parent
Re:Not Sweet (Score:4, Interesting)
How to do that though, I am not sure.
Parent
Re:Sweet! (Score:5, Funny)
Indeed. Buh-bye expert-sexchange. Good riddance.
Parent
Re:Sweet! (Score:4, Insightful)
How so? I find lots of good stuff there. You do realize the "hidden comments" are not so hidden, right?
Parent
Re:Sweet! (Score:5, Informative)
Scroll to the bottom of the page. You will see another copy of the comments unhidden.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I confirm this, however, it's hit and miss.
Either way, Experts-Exchange should not get listed if they hide the answers from the public but not the Google bot.
Use UA Switcher -- EE is definitely cheating (Score:3, Informative)
This is what I thought until I looked more closely. EE definitely seems to serve different pages to GoogleBot, and appears to serve different pages to people referred directly from Google. I believe this is a distinct violation of Google's listing policy, and to be consistent with how they treat all the other website operators Google should be immediately de-listing Experts Exchange until it serves identical pages to Google as what it serves to everyone.
Try installing User Agent Switcher [mozilla.org] in Firefox, the
Re:Sweet! (Score:5, Funny)
Now all of my search results will have comments on them with advertisements for herbal V1@gra. Sweet!
Parent
Re:Sweet! (Score:4, Insightful)
Great, now some spammer s going to write millions of bots to do the EXACT OPPOSITE of what you are doing thereby making the results even more useless.
Parent
How about this -- (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How about this -- (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:How about this -- (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
good point!
about.com
youtube
anything that has sedoparking on it
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If you have Firefox, use the Customize Google add-on at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/743 [mozilla.org]
Experts-Exchange was useful up until a couple of years ago...
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
>Let us completely block certain domains from our personal search results. ExpertSexchange would be first to go.
How about Firefox + CustomiseGoogle add-on? Works for me.
Re:How about this -- (Score:5, Insightful)
what bugs me most is the sites that clone forum questions, load them up with ads and recycle them so that if you type in a question in to google one of these sites will come up with a perfect match but there is no answer or follow up to the question.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
What would be nice is for Google to add white and blacklists to our personal search settings.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I was studying for a certification test and had a CD for TransCender practice tests sitting on my desk. My girlfriend at the time gave me the weirdest look and asked, "Why do you have a Transgender DVD on your desk?"
A better question: Why were you dating someone who couldn't even READ?
so much for the algorithms then (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems like google has found out that Yahoo maybe had a point after all when they questioned the ability of algorithms to rank results.
Google has thus far always held that the only way to deal with this problem is automation, I find it really interesting to see them turn around like this and yield to the 'wisdom of the crowds'.
In the end this will probably result in just one more element in their ranking formula, the human factor. I still very much welcome this trend.
Humans are a lot harder to game than algorithms.
Re:so much for the algorithms then (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, do be serious. I give you one example: gold farmers. Yeah, pay someone to rank the results for you. See? System destroyed before it's begun.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Humans are a lot harder to game than algorithms.
I disagree, or else the marketing industry would not exists. Algorithms can be made to become pragmatic and change over the course of use. While humans can do the same, they also have emotions. I fully expect this to give rise to a new paradigm in marketing strategy.
doing Google's job for them (Score:3, Insightful)
You're helping them tune PageRank by messing with the results which, if you're building a search engine, may not be a good idea to help your competitor.
Hrm, all those masters and Ph.Ds floating around there and the best they can do is "uh... lets ask our customers?" Jesus, they could have paid some hicks @ a gas station in BFE and figured that one out.
Re: (Score:2)
Second that. This hick has been doing this for over a year now and the effect is starting to accumulate
(see 'zataka.com' for what I've been up to).
Re: (Score:2)
Protip: The clipart lady in the corner and the "zabillion links to high paying keywords"-layout make your site look like a generic typosquatting operation.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The one in... uh... zakata.com. Sorry, my bad. Generic typo link farm looks like a link farm :)
If it does influence rank will people game it? (Score:5, Interesting)
Google makes it fairly obvious which results are paid for at the moment, but if this system were to be implemented it wouldn't be as easy to decide if that number one search result is there due to Google's search algorithms or because the site owner paid some company to bump it up and leave dozens of positive comments. Of course the reverse is also possible where a competitor's website is bumped down the list and filled with comments about how bad or unhelpful the website was. In some cases you wouldn't even need to pay someone to do it. Any fairly large group with an agenda would be capable of unbalancing things.
The only redeeming feature is that this is a Google product and will probably be in beta for the next few decades. By then I'll be more worried about the kids on my lawn than my Google search results.
Re: (Score:2)
that site is f'ing disgusting.
Re:If it does influence rank will people game it? (Score:4, Insightful)
I have a feeling that this will be pivotal for web 2.1 - "computing in the crowd"
That said, I'm sure that Google is not giving up on it's automated rankings, but rather looking for a way to implement a new source of page rank value. Strange or not, I think there there is some possibility that this can be beneficial. Knowing Google, they've been working on this for awhile, and it already does something useful. If all they manage to do is positively identify sites that should NOT be on the front page, it would improve results that I get from Google, especially when using complex searches.
If the voting/comments help them identify sites that have risen too high in rank, such information can be used to improve the automation processes. That is what I think they are doing. Crowd-sourcing the manual task of identifying sites that have incorrectly high page rank.
Parent
Pagerank back to the top? (Score:3, Insightful)
I personally find Google's rankings to be terrible, far worse than Yahoo's, and much more likely to have a bunch of spam sites near the top. If they were to integrate results from this project, and if they can keep the spambots from flooding the project with fake rankings, or if they could learn from my submissions that I don't want fake sites with lists of nonsense words as results, they would become a far more powerful than I can imagine.
Finally (Score:3, Funny)
I can start commenting/modding search results as "+5 Informative" or "-1 Off-topic!"
How comments will be used: (Score:2)
stfu google u dont no ne thing about commants. fucktard
(Kidding, of course)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Google must have noticed what a wonderful contribution the comments on YouTube videos make to the viewing experience. Now they want to bring that level of witty repartee to the internet in general.
(Insert ref to that YouTube comic at xjdk^h^h^h^hxckd^h^h^h^hkxhd^h^h^h^hxjxd^h^h^h^hdamitdamitDAMIT)
How Might This Work? (Score:2)
Far be it from me to RTFA, but I can foresee this evolving into a framework where, to track the quality of rankings given by individuals, the individuals in question must, to coin a phrase, "log on" to Google.
I suppose we should call the process of rating the rankings something. Let's randomly pick a word, mmmmm, say "moderate". And then, to rate the rankings given by said individuals, other "logged on" users could anonymously rate the ratings, as it were. Darn it, now we need another word, what about...mmm
Are they running out of work? (Score:3, Informative)
Comments? From people? On the Internet?
Does Google have a line on a new revenue stream that involves harvesting every known variant on "CHAD IS TEH GAY!!!1!"?
what about... (Score:4, Interesting)
What about just randomly giving registered Google users 5 mod points. Then up to 5 results in a search can be moded up or down depending on what the user prefers. Might work. ;-)
How about a better feature.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Let me put in my prefs a list that always get's added to my searches...
-patent is a big one that will get rid of a crapload of garbage results. I'd like that one on by default forever.
Did you mean: (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Did you mean: (Score:5, Informative)
One thing I wish I had control over was the "Did you mean:" function. I'd like to be able to answer the question yes or no, rather than having to go into the query and putting quote marks where I want to search for a word it thinks is spelled wrong.
You already can. For instance, say you are looking for "FUBAR". For "no", you just use the results it gives you on the page where it asks "did you mean FOOBAR?" as if it didn't ask. For "yes", click the word "FOOBAR" and it will give you listings of "FOOBAR" with the search term changed to "FOOBAR".
Parent
Here's what I'd expect from this (Score:3, Insightful)
I doubt Google is dumb. I'm fairly sure they know exactly that people will start pushing their pages, so they will most likely require you to create an account. And behold, they already have that feature with gmail and their other services.
So people will start creating thousands and more accounts to game the results. Google will do what they already do when ranking pages: The "older" you are, the more weight you will have. So pumping a site with a billion new accounts won't do jack when someone with a 5 year old account votes you down.
And so on. Google has already quite a bit of experience with people trying to trick their algorithms, I guess they will have some sort of system at hand to secure themselves against spamsites claiming the top spots.
What I do expect from this, though, is an increase in hack attempts against google accounts...
grob (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So you're saying you want to see every single page that includes the text you searched for, ordered randomly?