Google Tests Custom Highlights, Comments In Search

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."

Sweet!

Now I can rank the advertisements lower and comment on sites that pretend to be informational and are nothing but advertising.

Not Sweet

Now the spammers can pay people in ${ThirdWorldNation}
to rate advertisements higher and comment favorably
on them

Do not underestimate...

...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"....

Rating....

...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?

Re:Rating....

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

Re:Do not underestimate...

In Soviet Russia, the gender neutral first person pronoun is you!

Re:Not Sweet

It could be useful for setting up individual search profiles. For instance, I search for computer stuff all the time, so if I search for "wine" chances are I'm looking for the wine, the windows emulator, rather than the wikipedia article on the difference between red and white wines.

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.

Re:Not Sweet

I think the commenting could be helpful if you could set up communities too. For instance, a group of python enthusiasts could see comments by other python enthusiasts. It could really reduce the blogspam if the group kept spammers out, or even kept spammer numbers low.

How to do that though, I am not sure.

Re:Sweet!

Indeed. Buh-bye expert-sexchange. Good riddance.

Re:Sweet!

How so? I find lots of good stuff there. You do realize the "hidden comments" are not so hidden, right?

Re:Sweet!

Scroll to the bottom of the page. You will see another copy of the comments unhidden.

Re:Sweet!

Now all of my search results will have comments on them with advertisements for herbal V1@gra. Sweet!

Re:Sweet!

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.

How about this --

Let us completely block certain domains from our personal search results. ExpertSexchange would be first to go.

Re:How about this --

to bump up AmateurSexChange?

Re:How about this --

Or you could use the Google cache with Firefox and scroll all the way to the bottom of their page - you'll see all the answers you need.

Re:How about this --

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.

so much for the algorithms then

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

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.

If it does influence rank will people game it?

If people are actually able to make an impact on the page rank for different sites, how long until we see some websites trying to game the system. It's already possible for you to buy a front page spot on Digg [socialelves.com] for a few hundred dollars.

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:If it does influence rank will people game it?

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.

what about...

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....

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:

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. It might do Google's algorithm some good, too, if they can get feedback on their suggestions. I would also like the option to ask for additional suggestions, especially on multi-word queries.

Re:Did you mean:

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".