Google Unsure About Letting Users Vote On Search 145
narramissic writes "Google began running a live test last year that lets people rank and remove search engine results and comment on them. Testers were presented with different variations of the experiment, which the company first publicly detailed about two weeks ago in an official blog posting. For example, in one version of the test, people can only remove results, while in another they can append comments that only they can see, said Google software engineer Matt Cutts. But while implementing these features permanently would be a major step for Google in giving more participation to its users, the company remains undecided. 'It's a really fun experiment. I can't say for sure whether it will go live for everybody because we're always running a ton of experiments. Only some of those, the ones that are being very successful, are launched live for everybody,' said Cutts. In the meantime, Google is collecting data that offers some interesting search quality insights."
Great (Score:5, Funny)
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Great.
They'll be removed for you, and nobody else. The great thing about collaborative filtering is that people who try to game the system, simply game themselves into a niche.
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Re:Great (Score:5, Insightful)
In a nutshell, that's the problem with any of these wetware additions to algorithms, they introduce a new element that can be gamed. If enough people do that (and the incentive is very large, a whole 'SEO' industry has jumped up around gaming the system) then the end result is negative.
Google is well aware of this and I think it is one of their main reasons for being very cautious about giving this any 'weight' in their search results.
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"Let any idiot edit your website" works okay on Wikipedia because the good idiots are more motivated than the bad idiots. I wonder if more people can be found to care that much about a search engine than about a nonprofit encyclopedia.
Re:Great (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, that's why external links on Wikipedia are nofollowed. SEO spammers screamed blue murder, but Wikipedia's responsibility is to its readers, not to get a third party (SEO spammers) in good with a fourth party (Google). And the spam dropped when we did it.
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Basically this was brought about by having a system which was open to anybody to vote.
I have worked with expert systems also and none of these modeling techniques work with an open system. And I don't think that googles will work if it is left open to
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Somalia, being a libertarian paradise
If you discount the Islamic militia and the Islamic Courts Union [wikipedia.org] maybe.
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This is absolutely the way Google should implement this...make the change only appear to you, and then find a way to correlate the data that avoids gaming.
It would probably require that you be logged in to Google, but that shouldn't be too much of a burden on most people who would want this feature. You could use a cookie to send your "don't show" list, but that could start to get pretty large over time, and has the disadvantage of not being available across multiple computers.
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try http://www.customizegoogle.com/ [customizegoogle.com]
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Maybe they can split the search ranks into finite manageable groups of people.
Basically if you manually pick or are auto-assigned the "Left Wing Slashdotter" group, you will get that sort of ranking for queries.
Whereas if you are in "OMG ponies!" group, you will get a different sort of ranking for queries.
And if you're in the "SEO optimization group", you and all the spammers can fight amongst yourselves to push up your sites in your own group.
I think it's actually doable. Wh
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But the SEO spammers aren't going to join the SEO spamming group. They will join the OMG Ponies group and the Slashdot group and spam their own opinions from there.
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The groups will be created by google, based on how users rate search results. And users could also rate the groups from their own POV.
People who go "omgponies!" will be placed in one group.
You can choose to see the POV of the omgponies group, but your votes will only be considered as part of the omgponies group if you really do vote like them. If you and a whole bunch of your "accounts" vote a bit like that but add spammy stuff, and enough of the om
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Get thousands of slashdotters to remove it and we could change the results!
Sure, for the thousands of slashdotters who participate.
If you let people vote and comment on searches (Score:5, Insightful)
Then your searches will start to resemble the quality of YouTube.
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Re:If you let people vote and comment on searches (Score:4, Interesting)
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Damn that means I won't be able to find pr0n no more.
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Moderation/Meta Moderation? (Score:5, Funny)
Or has that been done already? =)
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Re:Moderation/Meta Moderation? (Score:5, Insightful)
Most websites don't even try pretending to be "fair and balanced". Though in Digg's case, it's really just demographics at work since it's entirely user-submitted crap. Slashdot is at the very least editor-skimmed, user-submitted crap (and a significantly wider age demographic, which often shows when the odd non-tech political argument comes up - this is obviously a giant echo chamber for tech politics).
Just consider... Digg's BitterOldGuy is probably 24.
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/me will admit to visiting digg occasionally, and between digg and /. idle I'd have to give digg the better mark. At least *some* of it is interesting.
Good thing /. allows you to filter out by section.
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I visit digg too, but like Slashdot go there primiarily for the discussion. Unfortunately, while Digg has somewhat more interesting submissions (outside of tech anyways), most of the users are babbling incoherent idiots with the debate skills of a third grader. Between that and a completely broken login system (I honestly can't understand how they were so successfully able to fuck up implementing cookies, given how easy it is to do correctly), I've stopped commenting entirely and unsubscribed from the mai
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You, Sir, fail at humor. Parent was refering to /., and you just said it's like digg. Ouch!
Anyhow. I think that moderation could still improve results for some niche searches. Only techies will search for "OSI model", and I'd trust them with moderating results for me. Works quite well for /., after all.
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The reality is that internet 'searches' would not look much different from what they currently are when you use http://www.customizegoogle.com/ [customizegoogle.com] to filter out unwanted results. The only real problem is you would definitely have to register so no anonymous searching and your current IP address will be completely irrelevant. When it comes to blocking sites, when enough negative results come up for a site, a google staff member can do a quick review and make a simple judgement call as to how relevant the page
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I'd at least like to be able to flag Free Registration Yada Yada sites.
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Atleast digg doesnt pretend to be a fair and balanced news channel. its also ammusing to watch the presidential race on the internet, its clear that the rest of the english speaking world has already decided that obama should win and as a result the tubes have got clogged with bias.
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Apparently, I have pissed off the Mod's from both major parties.
So be it.
Don't like what you hear this time around?...Don't blame me....as far as the turd sandwich or shit casserole, I will search for alternates.
All I will say is this:
THINK and RESEARCH before you vote...it is VITAL! Fsck the partisan modder's. Think for yourselves as individuals, if you are interested in personal freedom.
I for one, welcome our /. overlords! (Score:2)
It overwhelmed TFA servers! /.!!!!
It levels tall buildings!(from #1)
It's faster than a speeding (and frantic IT Team) bullet!
It's
(my apologies to Superman, or is it Souperman?)
If you look for the smoke, it is either failed electronics, or the /. effect, or there is no smoke , and it is your imagination. :)
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Great. (Score:5, Interesting)
So with this, I could get even more spam alongside my search results. I've got the feeling that "Ext3nd your pinis at foobar.com" would be a pretty ubiquitous comment.
Re:Great. (Score:5, Funny)
I visited foobar.com and it's returning a 403 now. I can only assume it's slashdotted. That says a lot about penis size of slashdotters.
And me, because I went there too.
Please please pretty please? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Please please pretty please? (Score:5, Interesting)
You realize the link-farmers would figure out how to use this to their advantage, right?
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Overheard in Springfield... (Score:2)
Re:Please please pretty please? (Score:5, Insightful)
By doing this Google get a bunch of data that their competitors have no access to meaning search quality stops being about your algorithm design and starts being about the size of your userbase, something Google will win hands down at the moment. It'll be great for removing spam like you suggest, it'll probably improve the rankings for proper results too, but in the long term all it will do is cement Google's position as the number one player unless someone manages to figure out a search algorithm that's better than a bunch of humans - that's a little unlikely.
Perhaps once it's been running for a while Google won't need to improve their algorithms at all. Hell, they could probably abandon them completely and move to a human-moderated index.
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it will be a great blow for Google actually, to have to admit that humans can out do computers in something as complex as ranking search results.
After all, that's what Yahoo has been telling them for years now.
To admit they were wrong all along is actually quite an about face.
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only its not admitting their wrong, its saying that humans can help computers, everytime google add a new algorithm to their lineup, they dont throw away everything that went before.
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Perhaps once it's been running for a while Google won't need to improve their algorithms at all. Hell, they could probably abandon them completely and move to a human-moderated index.
Slight problem with that - how does anything new then get added to the index. Since very few people move beyond the first page of search results all that this can possibly achieve is to reorder the first page a little. And that's discounting the botnets that will certainly be brought to bear the moment anything like this becomes reality.
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Some people do have the habit of checking past the first page of results, either from interest or OCD.
They'll just pick those people as bot-herders once they notice the behavior.
Re:Please please pretty please? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nevermind link farmers, I'd like to get rid of the million and one storefronts that top the list when searching for any sort of product information (whether or not they actually carry that product, oddly enough).
Once upon a time, you could add a few keywords to filter them out (like "review -buy -price"), but the stores seem to have caught on and always have a (usually blank) review section, as well as frequently disguising their "buy" link (often having it as an image). Not quite spam, but the same idea applies - Do these stores really think that if they can just trick me into visiting them, I'll buy something there?
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as well as frequently disguising their "buy" link (often having it as an image).
If a store's "buy" link has no alternate text, try leaving a comment that it is not accessible to customers with blindness or certain other disabilities. Then watch the PR people squirm in the reply.
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Re:Please please pretty please? (Score:5, Informative)
You know that experts-exchange has to be showing google those answers to get indexed. Turn off javascript and then page down all the way to the bottom, past the excessively long "footer". All the text is down there, visible.
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Filtering my own results (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Filtering my own results (Score:5, Interesting)
Well god knows they have enough data on the entire world to implement ranking in a way that's weighted towards users similar to you (whether they've got people with the data mining skills to produce that kind of thing is another story - they're brilliant, but that's some damn tricky work). If was a simple vote-up/vote-down system, they could just use their existing organic results and maybe tint the background either slightly red or green for results that users tend to find less or more helpful (maybe using time-on-site data from their pool of analytics would be better, as pre-click votes are worthless and most people wouldn't go back to rank them after the fact).
If they can't automate it, they won't do it. IIRC there was some post a while back about them tweaking The Algorithm something like 3000 times a year, but they never blacklist sites or rankings by hand. These days it's probably as much for DMCA protection as anything else, but introducing a human element (that exists only within Google) is a bad idea for bias alone, never mind the actual labor overhead.
I'd say that it remains an interesting exercise, but should probably stay as such. I don't think all of the data mining in the world could successfully counter the collective stupidity of the human race.
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Well god knows they have enough data on the entire world to implement ranking in a way that's weighted towards users similar to you
Ummm, sorry Mister Fitsinabox, but I do not believe that would work for me. I'm a Linux geek who also hangs out with and has shared interests with "the cool kids". I support the entire first amendment and the entire second amendment as protecting an individual right. I'm a code hacker, a circuit hacker, a hardware hacker, and a hardware maker (I use industrial scale mills for fu
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Outside of the hiking thing, you pretty much just described half of Slashdot (and of that half, I'm sure at least a couple others have ventured outdoors a couple of times). Maybe not as carbon-copy clones of yourself, but enough that the data could be used usefully.
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Outside of the hiking thing, you pretty much just described half of Slashdot (and of that half, I'm sure at least a couple others have ventured outdoors a couple of times). Maybe not as carbon-copy clones of yourself, but enough that the data could be used usefully.
I will happily admit that I fit in better in this community than in most. And the very cursory list I provided knocks me down below 50%, not counting hiking.
And I'm pretty sure you are overstating it by a significant margin - no way does 50% of t
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There are over 6 billion people on this planet. You really think no one else shares those same interests?
I think there are maybe a couple thousand people who share a similar interest profile.
And I think thousands out of 6 billion will get lost in any analytical system whose intent is to create clusters - unless they have a million clusters, which would thin the data set to the point where it would be unusable. (as an aside, I work in Internet advertising at the moment, have written collaborative filtering s
Why they are unsure..... (Score:3, Funny)
After the Googol-th (10^100th) entry commented "Winged penis !", "MSN is pants !" or "It's the end of the world as we know it !", Google (GOOG) decided that, maybe this wasn't such a brilliant idea after all...
Humanity groupthink? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or what about nationalism from a very populous country? A website criticizing one of those countries could get voted down in to oblivion - even if it's right.
Just some thoughts at 04:32 EDT.
Re:Humanity groupthink? (Score:5, Insightful)
Pure democracy is tyranny of the minority by the majority. Democracy without limits is never a good idea.
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That is as true a statement as they come. What happened to inalienable rights? They never said, "inalienable unless a whole lot of people agree," it was phrased that way for a reason. (now I go a bit off subject) government, or anyone for that matter, can not change my rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
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So who should determine those limits? An elite group of land-owning white men? Modern politicians who have done whatever it takes to rise in power? You?
Seriously, if I knew the answers to questions as profound as this, I'd hardly be posting on slashdot, would I? These questions presume that the group in charge are automatically "evil" (you use loaded terms). By your definition, Democracy is inherently "evil", as it means someone is always in charge.
Why is a tyranny of the majority by the minority preferable?
I never advocated that either. If your view is "there is always going to be a tyranny, so we may as make sure that it benefits the largest slice of society", then I'm not going to argue with you. Mostly, we ca
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Or what about nationalism from a very populous country? A website criticizing one of those countries could get voted down in to oblivion - even if it's right.
In the case of Britain it would be the other way round. We love stories saying how bad it is but any suggestions that we don't have cause to winge would be voted down.
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It really depends on how its implemented.
At least on /. are forced to assign an adjective to your moderations, guiding you towards thinking more objectively about it. (Doesn't always work, but at least the mod points are a limited resource)
Else where I've seen horrible voting system. Digg is a pretty bad example. Unlimited votes and an ajax thumb. Ideal for the obsessive compulsives, and practically begs for group think to take over.
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Actually, that is digg's purpose. There whole philisophy is based around something like "what is everyone looking at now". Everyone being the majority.
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No problem, we want out scammers. (Score:2)
Most likely 100% or thereabouts of people would agree about what is not related to the topic.
If 1% or 2% of people agreed that something is relevant you would roughly know where to find minority opinions, which could built into the system, i.e. show search results which only between 3% and 5% of people find relevant, this way you would find minority opinions about any given topic.
I wish more people would understand that rating does not equal censorship.
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Are you American (and therefore assume the rest of the world is as religious as Americans are)? Or are you proposing a hypothetical situation?
Nowhere near 90% of the human population believes in a God. I lived in Japan for three years, worked in a school with thousands of people. In three years I met a total of two (2) people that believed in God.
Hey, maybe that's just Japan, or just that part of Japan, or just that school, anecdotal evidence and sample-si
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If websites were voted on, I'm wondering if the web will turn into one giant human group think.
That already occurs. All Google page rank is is a way to evaluate what people think about a site. It does this by analyzing the social network formed by hyperlinks.
I've seen a lot of speculation that this would work as an alternative to the existing algorithm for ordering search results in general. Wouldn't this make more sense if changed the ordering for an individual? I.e. if Google learns that I am more likely to rank up open source sites and rank down closed source sites, Google could push open sour
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Ah, but we are protected by the fact that no two theists believe in the same god.
1 billion votes for Allah (divided more or less equally between Sunni and Shia, with trace elements of Sufism).
1 billion votes for Jesus (block vote delivered by benedict@vatican.va)
1 billion more votes for Jesus (assorted factions of oddba
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Too exploitable (Score:4, Insightful)
This mechanism would be too exploitable. Why not code bots that would push your own site/agenda/whatever, and wash down all the rest of the results? It's been done before. No amount of clever code protection has ever stopped TEH HAXXORZ (to distinguish from "hackers" ;) ) before. And even if nobody would be up to taming this beast code-wise, we all know how eager people are to solve captchas for money - why not make them :thumb up: your selected result?
I'm sorry Google, i'd prefer to stay with your cold, unfeeling algorithms, that at least give me a good representation of search results.
Exactly. (Score:2)
This idea is the perfect way for corporations and political groups to completely destroy truly representative searches.
Astroturfer groups will bury websites which offer contrary evidence.
Centralized establishments like the MAFIAA, Micro$oft, Big Telecom, the Repugnicrats, and the Demolicans will hire contractors whose job is specifically to stuff the "ballot boxes".
Non profits like the EFF and savetheinternet will disappear into the 9th page, while Fox's latest fabrications will magically make #1 every sing
Never mind corporations... (Score:2)
There's an image tagger, for instance. It's a kind of game: Google presents you and a random other person with the same images in sequence. You type in a series of tags, until both of you type the same thing; Google then has two people independently entering the same term, so it knows that tag is valid, and both of you are awarded points towards a high score. Good idea, right?
Well, no. Anonymous put u
Google Unsure About Letting Users Vote On Search (Score:3, Funny)
Why don't they put it to a vote?
And if they are not sure if this is a good idea they could put it to a vote
And if they are not sure if this is a good idea they could put it to a vote
And if they are not sure if this is a good idea they could put it to a vote
[Stack Overflow in googlePolicyRules(112)]
Re:Google Unsure About Letting Users Vote On Searc (Score:2)
I think you'd be better off coding that as a loop instead of recursing.
wikia search (Score:2, Informative)
This is what http://re.search.wikia.com/ [wikia.com] is doing
Flagging but not voting? (Score:3, Interesting)
How about the ability to flag search results as link farms, ect. Then have Google check them and chuck them if it's the case.
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Spam floodgates /w voted search (Score:1, Interesting)
I hate to say it but spam floodgates would open, everyone wants to be at the top of google for certain keywords.
Digg already suffers from a lot of spam (even though there are a lot of interesting things).
There are whole companies dedicated to farming the language space and owning up key domain names and words in search. Search unfortunately has to keep the barbarians at the gate from flooding in. There are too many idiots and nefarious people out there looking to game the system.
Personally I'd like userba
Pattened? (Score:1)
Though, the real question is - who will patent it first.
Block Sites from Search List (Score:2, Insightful)
I want to be able to setup a list of site I don't want included in my search and a list of sites to be given higher priority. This would be more much useful for me. Or even a word filter on site names, this way I can cut out a lot of crap when trying to find info.
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Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't see what could possibly be improved by giving the same wankers who invented spam, phishing, viruses, worms, trojans, 411 scams, Google-bombs, etc. ad nauseum, influence Google's search results.
I'd like a personal blacklist (Score:3, Interesting)
The two facilities I'd most like to see on Google are the ability to blacklist domains from my results and to either specifically include or exclude merchants from my results.
For the former givemebackmygoogle [givemebackmygoogle.com] is a good start as my pet hate are the price comparison cretins or fleabay who return results for just about anything you enter in the search box. Unfortuntately though whilst givemebackmygoogle is all well and good I'd like to maintain my own blacklist.
For the latter it would take something like Google for there to be enough people to flag sites as merchant sites or not. The reason I'd like this requirement is that merchants tend to get pushed up in Google results so it would be really good to be able to exclude them when I'm simply looking for information. Similarly if I'm trying to buy something I'm only interested in merchant sites as I've already done my research and am not interested in sites that aren't selling anything.
Despite it being rather good it can sometimes be a royal pain in the arse trying to find something via Goggle.
As it is I've written my own custom Google search page in PHP which builds a query string then appends a large "-inurl(name1|name2|name3)" directive on the end of it before calling Google.
But it would be nice to have this facility on Google itself. They should like this sort of thing too as by using a custom blacklist they get all that juicy "this individual likes this sort of stuff" profiling crap that advertisers lust after.
Just my tu'ppence worth.
Is a two-sided blade (Score:1)
Who cares about voting... (Score:2)
I want to be able to put in my own search rules and it remembers it in a cookie on my pc or in my login.
I have a nice long string that eliminates a lot of the garbage that google now includes in searches. The useless patents or fake patents, the damn link sites as well as a raft of other sites that used to be blocked by google but is now included and destroys the signal to noise ratio.
They should allow users to easily report the sites that are BS link farms. to be delisted completely.
Well Google has cleaned up Cindy McCain demon pics (Score:2)
Populist Search, Great (Score:2)
So now when I search for Image Magick, I'll see only results about Photoshop, because the average idiot knows nothing about scripted image manipulation (including what that phrase means).
When I search for "aptitude", I'll get nothing related to Debian, because the general public doesn't know what a Debian is.
When I search for "ALSA", I'll get nothing about Advanced Linux Sound Architecture, because the general public doesn't know what Linux, Sound Architecture, or even anything truly Advanced is.
When I sear
They don't want it to become Digg/Reddit (Score:2)
In which all stories become a subset of:
* LOLcats
* Anti-Republican Activism
* Chicken Soup for the Failure-At-Life's Soul
* Tits (NSFW)
* Funniest Russian Cartoons Evar
I like the idea of Digg and Reddit, but one trip over there and suddenly you'll discover a new love for Slashdot and its moderators.
Do people really like advertising? (Score:2)
Or is the love of advertising on social networks an immitation of how The Goog prioritizes search results? If people don't naturally prefer sponsored links, their search votes could cost Goog a lot of money.
User recommendations would be gamed (Score:2)
If Google uses user comments to affect search, massive attempts would be made by the "search engine optimization" people to game the system. If you thought link farms were bad, phony user farms would be worse. Google won't be able to identify the phonies; they can't even More fundamentally, there's a scaling problem. As I've pointed out before, the number of raters per site has to be large for rating to work. Rating for movies and TV shows works fine. Hotels might get enough ratings to be useful. Jo
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Not that this specific case matters to me
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In a heartbeat!
Also, those stupid ad sites which grab any string and claim to have the lowest prices on . (i.e. bizrate.com)
Forget about affecting other people's results--I just want to filter mine. Automatic penalty for some sites, Absolute banning of some sites, and I'd be a happy camper again.