Google Algorithm Discriminates Against Bad Reviews 175
j_col writes "According to the official Google blog, Google has altered their PageRank algorithm to not give back linking points to bad reviews of websites belonging to online retailers, following the publication of a recent article in the New York Times describing one woman's experiences in being harassed by an online retailer she found via Google. The specific changes to the algorithm are of course a guarded secret. So considering that these changes are already live, how do we know how the algorithm determines a bad review from a good one, and whether or not innocent online retailers will be wrongly punished by having their rankings downgraded?"
DecorMyEyes is the 4th result on the 2nd page (Score:2)
So is it really 'buried?'
Re:DecorMyEyes is the 4th result on the 2nd page (Score:5, Insightful)
That's pretty buried. If I don't see what I'm looking for on the first page of results, I adjust my search terms, I don't click through to the second (of countless) page of results.
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QED http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1893316&cid=34420638 [slashdot.org]
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You linked to a comment one comment down?
Thanks
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NP mate.
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Just wait until they figure out how to link to their same comment.
Re:DecorMyEyes is the 4th result on the 2nd page (Score:4, Informative)
It may as well be.
http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2008/04/iprospect-blended-search-study.html [marketingpilgrim.com]
There are studies that says that beyond the first page the majority of people don't bother continuing to search and use more words or different search engines.
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The fact that results now stream into Google as you scroll down the page makes this finding obsolete.
There is no notion of "page" anymore.
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You must be thinking of DuckDuckGo. Google still has pagination, even with the "live" searching thing.
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Have you tried image search recently? There's no pagination there anymore.
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True, but pagination is alive and well in the normal Web search.
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At this time, DecorMyEyes doesn't appear ont he first 4 pages for me. I stopped looking after that.
What we don't know is whether or not it evaluates the bad reviews to good reviews. If I ahve 2000 reviews on line, how big of an impact is 1 bad review? 50? 500?
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Googling for reviews is a nearly worthless endeavor anyway. 90% of the time I just find worthless pages at price aggregators and then countless more worthless reviews that are little more than cut-n-paste of product spec sheets.
Poor summary... (Score:5, Informative)
Uh, no. Google changed it so that websites of poorly reviewed retailers lose points, not the reviews themselves.
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Thanks, I was pretty confused there for a while after re-reading the sentence three times. :-S
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blogspot is gaming the system! (Score:3)
I had the same problem. I didn't understand WTF the summary was saying, so I had to RTFA.
Hey, wait a minute. googleblog.blogspot.com is gaming the system to get more pageviews, by getting people to post bad summaries to Slashdot!
Slashdot's editorbot should use the coherency engine on summaries, and if the summary doesn't make sense or has too much non-humorous ambiguity, it should penalize the linked articles.
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Poor Title: discrimination against badly reviewed (Score:5, Insightful)
... not "bad reviews", which would be very anti-consumer.
Instead, the poorly reviewed products and services are going to lose index.
This kind of selective pressure will reward those companies whose services and products garner better reviews.
I just wonder if this will lead to more astroturfed reviews and payola for review-sites like Yelp.
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This kind of selective pressure will reward those companies who can afford to pay people to destroy the page ranking of their competitors.
FTFY.
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Your point would have been better accepted (to me anyways) if you hadn't used the "Fixed that For ya" meme -
But yes, I fear this won't encourage more positive reviews but only more negative reviews between competitors.
Perhaps it will eventually reach a point where competitors will push each other into the dirt with bad reviews and a completely unreviewed product will be the one with the highest rank.
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Except as the google blog post stated, negative reviews don't harm the company's site, they just don't get positive boosts and credit from it.
Essentially before, both positive and negative reviews helped and counted, now only positive reviews help and count. This doesn't allow other companies to destroy other's page rank.
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Re:Poor Title: discrimination against badly review (Score:4, Insightful)
This kind of selective pressure will reward those companies who can afford to pay people to destroy the page ranking of their competitors.
FTFY.
I thought about that but the article states that
an algorithmic solution which detects the merchant from the Times article along with hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide an extremely poor user experience
.. I presume this means that the weighting would not be linear, but more like an exponential dropoff when reviews are numerous, time-disjoint, and all negative. I'm sure Google has done at least a sample analysis using their mountain of data. I think the biggest point made here is that (as a vendor) services to monitor your product/service will become increasingly important so you can reply to negative reviews and actively manage any trolls... whether this leads to more engagement or simply more astroturfing is yet to be seen.
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Safe bet ... as they say in the article, people are trying to game Google rankings constantly ... if there's money to be had, someone will keep trying.
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If Google's change does what's intended, downrank URLs of merchants who invite furious web opinion as a marketing ploy to game search engines, only the losers, like bile-thriving DecorMyEyes' Vitaly Borker will seek alternative means of self promotion. Frankly, I suspect that's a pretty small contingent of potential astroturfers -- 'hundreds' according to the Google blog.
I suspect that Google has indeed applied Sentiment Analysis, but done so narrowly, targeting only (1)merchants described with (2)domain-s
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Well, of course it will.
By the way, double-spacing every sentence is annoying to read.
Don't you think?
Reading comprehension FTL (Score:3)
The blog does not say what the contributor says it does. The closest it comes is noting that the links from the negative reviews never counted in the first place because the sites hosting the reviews used the "rel=nofollow" attribute on the links. What it does say is that they have altered the algorithm to punish bad businesses more effectively in response to the NYT article that suggested that being bad could be good for business.
Move along, nothing to see here!
Simple (Score:5, Funny)
They look for phrases like
Re:Simple (Score:5, Funny)
Great, Slashdot's PageRank just dropped like a rock thanks to you...
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I am no algorithm expert, but if I were in charge, I would start with that last phrase that you listed ("would not buy again") along with other similar phrases ("is a scam", "feel completely ripped off", etc). Then I would scan the massive Google database to see if I could find other phrases that are frequently located "near" to those key phrases, and see what I come up with.
I bet I'd come up with a pretty good list of phrases that have negative sentiment. I'd eyeball those, and get rid of the obvious bad
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It was a phone screen test. They were going to fly me out to the bay area for the interview - I was definitely interested in a free trip to California.
But I don't think they would have made me an offer to make it worth a move to a much more expensive part of the country.
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Discussion burst into flames when Ubuntu decided to switch its interface from Gnome to Unity. As a former windows user I went to right click everything in Gnome but none of the features were there. I never knew I was capable of that sort of pain, and one day I was some upset that I came home and kicked my dog. I tried to go online to buy the complete Beethoven Symphonies but in the Gnome copy of my browser it doesn't line up right so I misclicked and ended up with a mashup of music by Justin Bieber set to p
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6 results (one Slashdot) * contained a live bobcat... c'mon only 6?
I'm a bit shocked [xkcd.com]. I mean, I bungled the quote slightly (I think mine is better in context), but still.
Am I the only one... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, I've switched the majority of my searching to Bing over the last few months. I've found their results tend to be much more accurate than Google's for the things I search for.
Granted, not everyone out there is searching for transvestite-dwarf wrestling match information, but the way Bing services that niche is impressive.
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The "technical people" population hasn't driven Google's user base since about 6 months after their inception.
I still normally find what I need on the first page of results in any case, so without knowing what you're looking for... I couldn't say you're doing anything more than typical nerdbitching because they're popular.
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I'm a huge fan, but only because it is the best I've seen. Hell, I used to be a huge fan of hotmail - at one time (way, way long time ago) it was the best free email available...
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I'll complain about them. Finding useful review of something on google is a pain... search for a game...
IGN ... your "ULTIMATE SOURCE FOR news and media"... half the time its a place holder page; I just roll my eyes every time I see that in the search results.
or you get Nextag or Dealtime or any of a dozen other price / review aggregators with a place holder page populated with generated content that was scraped from somewhere else, and then barfed on.
And its the same content on all of them, because they'r
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As always YMMV, and I really don't care if the whole world does not see things the same way I do
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Or all the times it ignores what I typed completely, "Hey we think you are an idiot, so we searched for FOO instead of BAR, if you really want to search for BAR click here. But we think you want FOO.
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I have definitely observed greater difficulty in googling for pages that I am familiar with containing technical info but whose URL I cannot find at the moment, even when putting the site name into the search terms (With or without site:). On the other hand, I can pretty much ALWAYS find ANYTHING on my OWN site by putting its name (just the name, not even the .org) and a term or two into the google query, which I find interesting. Much of what I can't find is forum or mailing list archives, but of course, s
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PageRank is well documented, and scores for pages are available (or were) through the Google Toolbar, but you are correct in that to be effective the actual algorithms Google use to rank results need to be fairly closed (to avoid exploitation).
Nowhere in the linked blog post does Google mention PageRank - this is a poor summary.
I've been at technical events where Google engineers have given talks and explained that PageRank is now used for less that 0.1% of all queries. Clearly graph algorithms are still us
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Many times it actually corrects a real spelling mistake of course, the difference might be that when I make a spelling mistake I can only blame myself, but when google corrects something it shouldn't I can blame google..
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I think it's trying to be a bit too smart lately, constantly being "helpful" by searching for what it thinks I want to search for instead of what I actually wanted to search for.
Bingo. 'Smart' search engines suck, particularly for technical information, because you can never really tell what it's going to search for... the 'smarter' Google searches get, the less useful they become.
Of course it doesn't help when people pick names for their projects or products which are the same as or very close to some other word that's in common usage.
Google autocorrect can be disabled (Score:2)
Append "&nfpr=1" to the search URL. If you use keyworded bookmarks in Mozilla: http://www.google.com/search?q=%s&nfpr=1
False reviews (Score:3)
One hopes the guys at Google took into account the business that sets up a fake review site for the purpose of posting negative reviews of competitors to get Google to falsely downgrade them. My bet's on a manual filter to remove such sites, probably based on a discrepancy between those sites and every other review site.
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Wouldn't that be similar to (and perhaps offset by) people already doing them same with favorable reviews for themselves? It doesn't seem like a new problem, anyway.
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My understanding is that this would not affect results at all. What they are doing is no longer giving points to a site because a negative review linked to that page in the review. Before the change if you wrote a review that said "You should not buy a book [amazon.com] from Amazon because their books in particular are absolutely terrible an no one should go there!" Then Amazon's page rank for the keyword "book" would get a bump from the back-link to it. If you think about it this doesn't really make sense as you'd b
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Ah, Utopia, the memories. Have to watch out for those insurgents. If you're not careful, they'll take over the school and hospital. Oh, and the hurricanes! I say always plant your crops on the west side, so you don't lose them.
-dZ.
Oh yeah watch this: (Score:4, Funny)
Google is the worst company ever. They sold out and went evil. I give their company a poor review and personal rating.
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good great wonderful cheese love flowers butterflies excited appealing chocolate yay amazing cool googlicious
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The Reson this happened? Bad Press. (Score:4, Informative)
Its a long interesting read.
Quite the character mr. Borker is.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/business/28borker.html [nytimes.com]
"I'm a technical boy." (Score:2)
You have to wonder if Mr. Borker is familiar with that phrase.
I have used (Score:2)
bad reviews return to make decisions about company..namely not to use them.
As per the NY times article (Score:2)
How do we know that all of the "Barack Obama sucks" websites out there won't make it harder to search for the White House? Just one example of where semantic inclusion may not work.
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That would be sentiment analysis, which TFA specifically mentions they don't use because of exactly the problem you describe.
Crappy Summary (Score:2)
Article submitter sounds like a SEO moron suffering from a case of sour grapes.
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How is that different than what they do now? Would you prefer if they showed you all million pages that contained a set of keywords in random order?
Left out my line (Score:3)
I wonder how well that works with sarcasm. (Score:2)
I wonder how well that algorithm works with sarcasm.
Terrible summary (Score:2)
TFA specifically indicates that they don't do something as straightforward as is described (which would be sentiment analysis). Instead, they implemented some algorithm that lowers the ranking of some merchant websites that, according to them, provide a poor user experience. No further details on how their algorithm behaves are given. It doesn't even indicate that people giving poor reviews of the merchant or website factor in to the ranking change at all. (The only part where this comes in to play is their
I feel so terribly guilty now... (Score:4, Funny)
On a more serious note, correctly assigning "positive" or "negative" to a given adjective or phrase, across a wide range of subject areas, must actually be something that would give the computational linguists a bit of trouble(or 10,000 interns a very boring time of it)... Simply parsing star ratings or "out of 10" is easy enough; but is a vacuum cleaner that sucks good or bad?
Google can do what they want. (Score:2)
Why is everyone acting like page ranking should be anything but whatever Google wants them to be? They are free to use whatever they wish to determine the search results. If they decide to never show Hotmail when you search for email, there is absolutely nothing wrong, ethically or legally, with this. They are free to shun a competitor. They are free to put you last on every search if they just simply don't like you. They can put whatever they want into the search results, in whatever order they wish,
Why "crowdsourcing" doesn't work (Score:5, Interesting)
This is the fundamental problem with "crowdsourcing" reviews. Where the number of reviewers is large compared to the number of items being reviewed, as with movies, it works fine. Where the ratio is small, it doesn't. It's far too easy to game the system. There are automated tools for that. [wikipedia.org]
This problem has become worse since the October 27th change to Google, when Google Places/Maps results were merged into web search. This made "local" results much more prominent. Look at the first screen of Google search results for a local product or service. Most of what you see are Google Places results, maps, or ads. The organic results are so far down they don't matter.
As a result, the "black hat" SEO companies are now aggressively targeting Google's places and maps system. "Convert Offline" is quite open about this, with their article Dominating Google Maps- The Most Effective Spam Ever And What You Can Learn From It" [convertoffline.com] In some ways, Google Places is more vulnerable to attack than organic search. The number of web mentions of a local business tends to be small, so the amount of phony material that has to be generated to make a business look good is also small. Each mention carries a lot of weight.
Google might lose this battle. Craigslist did. Back in 2008, Cory Doctorow wrote about "Spammers discuss breaking Craigslist verification system" [boingboing.net]. It's become much worse [techdirt.com] since then. Personals were the first to go, and are now over 90% spam. Then Computer Services and Self Employment fell to the spammers. Jobs and Real Estate are under attack. Along the way, Gmail became a spam haven [google.com], especially after Jiffy Gmail Email Creator [cnet.com] became widely used.
The fundamental design assumption of Google is that important stuff has lots of links to it. That's not a valid assumption in local search.
Why do you care? (Score:2)
The specific changes to the algorithm are of course a guarded secret. So [...] how do we know how the algorithm determines a bad review from a good one
I think you pretty much answered that one yourself.
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I think it's time we had a rating agency for search engines. Something like what Moody's does (or at least is supposed to do) for bonds and what the BBB does for business in general. I'm not sure exactly how one would go about doing that, or what criteria would be selected to govern rankings, but with the number of search engines out there who don't publish their method of ranking things there has to be a way to determine who's system is the most accurate.
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I think it's time we had a rating agency for search engines. Something like what Moody's does (or at least is supposed to do) ...
Yeah, like that's worked out really well [nwsource.com].
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There is. It's called the market, and they are rated #1. If their results start to suck, then people will switch to a different search engine, as has already happened once.
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Markets can only work with information. What I'm thinking about is a way to provide meaningful information to consumers of search engines.
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Markets can only work with information. What I'm thinking about is a way to provide meaningful information to consumers of search engines.
What information would people be lacking, exactly?
They put a search term in Google and either find what they expected or they do not. Repeat the test with another engine and compare.
This doesn't seem all that difficult to me.
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If Google is providing an answer to a question asked (which is what a query is), then almost by definition the inquiring party does not have the necessary knowledge to judge the validity or accuracy of the response.
Or do you expect that people search in Google only using those terms for which they already know the results?
-dZ.
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The inquiring party can compare two engines and decide which on they prefer. Nothing else really matters.
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>>>Markets can only work with information
Yep and it's Our job to spread that information. Complain and moan about lousy businesses via word-of-mouth. I know I've stopped using Google since I learned they've been censoring Google News results of sites they don't like (such as foxnews) and yanking videos they find offensive from youtube (such as the Obama Deception). I'm now categorizing google as almost as bad as Microsoft and switching to Yahoo search as my default.
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Well, to be honest that seems pretty fair. There's no reason Google News should actually link to fake news sites.
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Yeah censorship of FOX is definitely the way to go.
Also maybe some attractive new uniforms for the Google staff, with a stylized "SS" on the arm.
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.. Fox isn't going to outrank the AP article they're syndicating. For U.s. political news (where they do their most reporting), they're on news.google.com -- right now, they're on 6 different news items.
As for yanking videos off of youtube, it's the customer base flagging it. You can argue that google shouldn't yank unpopular videos, but people marking it as offensive (or hate speech) is hard to ignore.
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Greetings and Salutations....
This has been going on for some time. I think it was late last year that I noticed that when I would
do searches for reviews of items (software, hardware, businesses, etc), I would find a LOT of positive
reviews but nothing negative. Since, up to that time, my experience with the Net was that the
only people that really posted serious reviews were the ones who had a bad experience with the
thing.
I cannot
Re:If they told you ... (Score:4, Insightful)
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I think once a "review" is identified, and they have sucks, a$$h0le.... and a whole lot of other cuss words, its safe to say its a negative review.
Such reviews grouped by percentage vs those that don't have these cuss words would give you if the reviewed entity is bad or good and by how much. Further take these percentages and total count of reviews over a period of time, say per week for the last dozen or so week, normalize against volume trends (e.g. more volume during Chirstmas rush for retailer , you ca
Re:If they told you ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, and in the article they acknowledge people are always trying to game their system. It's very clear that keeping it secret is done to delay gaming the system and to give them time to keep refining it.
Yes, someone will game it. Their response has been very reasonable.
Reification (Score:3)
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Heat wants to flow from hot to cold. Gasses and fluids want to flow from high pressure to low pressure. Electrons want to go away from negative charges and towards positive charges. Systems want to go to their minimum energy stat
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Heat wants to flow from hot to cold. Gasses and fluids want to flow from high pressure to low pressure. Electrons want to go away from negative charges and towards positive charges. Systems want to go to their minimum energy state. Information wants to be free.
You forgot Aristotle's observation that objects want to fall to the ground. Such statements only become seriously problematic if they are proffered as explanations of natural phenomena—as was the case with Aristotle; otherwise, they are merely cute or redundant.
These are all expressions that treat very abstract concepts as if they had desires. This is a mental trick that allows human brains to use its hardware-accelerated social simulation circuits rather than the general-purpose abstract thought circuits to predict how a system will behave.
Personification is simply a way of getting the most out of your brains. It's no more illogical than using any other optimization tricks. Of course it has pitfalls and you need to remember that concepts are not really thinking entities, but it often works amazingly well.
Your last two paragraphs appear to be complete blather. "Hardware-accelerated social simulation circuits": zero meaning. "Personification is simply a way of getting the most out of your brains": do you write self-improvement books? When I want
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A Google search has never been un-biased, and never would have worked if it were.
The whole point about the way Google ranks pages is to try to ascertain which pages people actually find useful ... so, initially when it came out, it was finding useful hits when Yahoo had become pretty much a degenerate case of a search engine retrieving everything but what you want. Every bloody search returned crap because the SEO wankers had polluted the indices with junk -- yo
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I didn't specify 'useful', but rather 'unbiased'. if someone is searching on the reliability of a vendor, then they will want to see all results (good or bad), while getting actual results about vendors. The two are not mutually exclusive. If, however, Google gets results back that are exactly what the user is looking for, but only presents results that are favorable to the vendor, than that is biased data.
Do not confuse unbiased with 'useful'.
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Which, is exactly the opposite of what they're doing.
They're not giving page-rank boosts to companies getting getting crappy reviews.
I'm pretty sure they're not selling the ability to move up the ranking to shitty vendors. They're making sure the users only see "good" data.
Biased towards being useful. Much better than completely unbiased,
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If a user searches for the reliability of an example company called 'widget company' and the 'widget company' happens to be a google customer, and along comes joe user searching for data on widget company, and if Google has a search result for widget company (both good and bad ratings by customers), that it's not being unbiased if they present only the good customer reviews?
I don't think you understand the meaning of the word unbiased.
This isn't' about return 'valid' search result, but about Google removing
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Frankly, I think you're jumping to conclusions. They said they developed an algorithmic solution, so it's not a blacklist and they said they didn't use sentiment analysis to penalize web sites. What I would guess they did was use sentiment analysis to negate the value of a link just like it was a "nofollow" link. It'd be hard to game that solution because you can already do it in a much simpler fashion, and it accomplishes the goal: ie. prevent bad reviews from boosting a site's page rank.
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From TFA:
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>>> The fact that they filter out the 'bad' for paying customers is egregious
What on earth are you talking about? Google's not damaging customers. They are demoting bad businesses like "DecorMyEyes" that sold counterfeit glasses, and therefore stole $450 from a customer. The really sad part of the story is that the customer disputed the charge, but the store owner called Citi Bank, pretended to be the customer, and said to close the dispute. Citi complied and then refused to reopen it. This fr
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Information doesn't like it when you anthropomorphize it.
Oh, the hilarity of posting this as an AC.
What moronic principal makes you arrive at the conclusion that people shouldn't have secrets? Maybe you should post your bank account and PIN if you believe that.
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Any other questions that could be answered by reading even just the first half of the first sentence in the summary?