Google Turns On User-Tweakable Search Wiki 161
Barence writes "Google has launched a new service that allows users to tailor to their own search results. Called SearchWiki, the service allows Google account holders to move results up or off the rankings, or even add their own choice of site to the top of the search results. Google claims that any changes a user makes will only affect their results, and not those of fellow surfers, although it's difficult to believe that some of the feedback generated from the SearchWiki won't be used to fine tune the Google search algorithm. Is this a cunning way to encourage people to sign in while they search, thus providing Google with a richer set of data that can be mapped to specific user accounts?"
How to turn the dang thing off: (Score:4, Informative)
Re:So what? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Bye bye Expert sexchange (Score:3, Informative)
There is no new Google-feature needed which they can datamine. All you need is the GooglePreview addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/189 [mozilla.org]
It allows you to filter out unwanted domains from your search results among very nice other features.
Re:So what? (Score:5, Informative)
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/1898 [userscripts.org] removes experts-exchange.com results from Google searches :)
Re:So what? (Score:5, Informative)
You can still see all the answers if you scroll all the way down to the bottom. I suspect they did this in order to avoid being blacklisted by Google. Why anyone would pay for that "service" is beyond me.
Re:So what? (Score:3, Informative)
I used to feel that way too, except that when you click on one of their links and scroll all the way to the bottom, you actually get the real answer -- otherwise google wouldn't bother to index the page. It is annoying though.
Re:What is the point? (Score:2, Informative)
Make edit 3 or you're lying!
You can't edit once someone has "Replied to This".
Re:So what? (Score:5, Informative)
1) Bookmark google (www.google.com)
[Optional: Bookmark search.yahoo.com, www.live.com, etc.]
2) In Firefox, right-click on the bookmark and choose properties.
3) Enter "g" as keyword for Google ("y" for Yahoo, etc.)
4) In the location field enter: http://www.google.com/search?q=%s -site:experts-exchange.com
Done. Now you can easily search by typing in the address bar:
g <keywords>
The %s in the location will be substituted by the keywords, and you get your Google research without expert-exchange.com entries.
[Nice side effect: since it is now as easy to type in "g" for Google, "y" for Yahoo and "m" for Microsoft, switching search engines is so easy that you actually do it from time to time.]
Re:Wikia (Score:3, Informative)
Uh... seems I forgot to include the actual link: Wikia Search [wikia.com] (alternatively you can google for "Wikia Search" :P)
Note how you can instantly and anonymously change almost everything. (needs Javascript however)
Re:Wikia (Score:4, Informative)
They adopted (or will be adopting) a core principle of Wikia Search, and that is user generated content [...] However, user generated content needs a community (in this case mainly to prevent or revert spamming) - and google had many unsuccessful community projects in the past... I wonder if they are foolish enough to try it again.
Well, a community is one way to prevent spamming, but is it the only way?
I mean, Wikipedia goes for a very transparent structure. If Wikipedia added secret algorithms to selectively display only certain users' contributions, they would probably be criticised by people on Slashdot, and elements of the Wikipedia community.
On the other hand, Google already uses secret automated moderation techniques for search results, and they are also pretty good at filtering spam in gmail. Both with no need for a community of volunteers doing filtering manually.
Furthermore, Google has not committed to using this user-generated data at all, let alone in an unmoderated form.
Now, I agree with you that Google hasn't got a track record of building user communities like Wikipedia. However, I think they could make user-moderated search work without one.
Re:So what? (Score:3, Informative)
Cookies don't necessarily mean that they're tracking information. Cookies are an essential part of sessions (at least in PHP).
Privacy issues aside, there may be real value here (Score:5, Informative)
Three words: User Relevance Feedback.
In 1986 I started work on the first commercial search engine that supported "similarity searching." This was based on the Cosine Coefficient of weighted attribute vectors. As we got deeper and deeper into what made one search successful and another a flop, it became obvious that there were two prime enemies of successful searching.
For example, a query of "man versus machine" (actually run by Esther Dyson in our offices), produced an apparently random mix of articles about chess-playing computers, labor strikes over factory automation, and some guy towing a locomotive with his teeth (it's been over 20 years, so I don't remember the exact results). She hesitated for a moment, then said, "Oh! They really are all about people and machines, but how do I narrow it down to what I meant, which was more along the lines of the labor articles?"
We already had an answer to this by the time she visited us. Our solution (based on the work of Salton and Buckley) was to allow the user to say, "Results 1 and 3 are irrelevant, but result 2 is highly relevant." We would then take the attribute vectors for the articles and raise or lower the importance of those terms in the new query vector. After the first round of relevance feedback, the results often got downright spooky. Why? Because a) we now had a lot more terms to work with, and b) the additional terms helped to disambiguate terms like "bank." E.g., mention of levee construction probably meant this was a "river bank" and not a financial institution.
What does this have to do with what Google is doing? By reordering your results you are, in effect, giving user relevance feedback. I don't know what they are going to do with this information, but just getting your hands on it is a very important first step. And having you bring things to the top is doubly important, because positive relevance feedback is several times more important than negative. E.g. Tell me to drive towards San Francisco, rather than just saying I should leave Chicago.
On the downside, as mentioned by several previous posters, this opens the door to deep understanding of the user and what s/he is interest in. (Of course, they already get some of this when you click on items in a result list. They have a little JavaScript goody that records each and every click. Fortunately, there are GreaseMonkey scripts to disable this "feature.") One of my (few) customers back in the 80's and 90's said, "If you know only the questions I ask, you know too much." The customer? The NSA.
Re:It works for *me* (Score:3, Informative)
Firefox 3 adds support for tagging bookmarks
Epiphany [gnome.org] has this for ages now.
Re:Google bombing (Score:2, Informative)
I was also once annoyed that the expertsexchange appeared in the results, until I realised that all the real replies are down the bottom of the page. If they weren't there, then Google couldn't have indexed them.
Re:So what? (Score:3, Informative)
Many sites turn that off due to the obvious security implications of people passing around links containing credentials.