Google is Going To Let You Annotate Search Results (theverge.com) 36
Ever wanted to add your own annotations to search results you find on Google? With Google's new "Notes" experiment, launching Wednesday as an opt-in feature through Search Labs, you'll be able to. From a report: If you've opted in to Notes, buttons to add and see notes will appear under search results and under articles on Discover in the Google app. When you create a note, you can add colorful fonts and images. During a briefing, Google showed me a note for an article about different kinds of frosting that had green text, an image of a cake, and a heart sticker. (At the bottom of the note, there was a link to the article the note was about.)
If you post a note, it should show up "within minutes," unless it's flagged for human review, Google VP Cathy Edwards said in an interview with The Verge. When you look at all of the notes for a link, what's shown will be ranked dynamically based on things like the user's query and a note's relevance to the content on the page.
If you post a note, it should show up "within minutes," unless it's flagged for human review, Google VP Cathy Edwards said in an interview with The Verge. When you look at all of the notes for a link, what's shown will be ranked dynamically based on things like the user's query and a note's relevance to the content on the page.
This will go well (Score:5, Interesting)
So a technique whereby people with too much time on their hands create content that gets lots of eyeballs without real life repercussions.
Thank the stars for safe harbor, right?
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Sounds like Reddit (Score:2)
Sounds like Reddit
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HBI [slashdot.org]: "So a technique whereby people with too much time on their hands create content that gets lots of eyeballs without real life repercussions."
Sounds like Reddit
Usenet but with ads?
Why (Score:4, Interesting)
All the results are SEO garbage now so what is the point?
Re:Why (Score:5, Interesting)
new training model for AI?
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I wonder what's gonna happen when AI finds out that most people think Google's search results are utter and total trash?
Because, well, let's be honest, what do you think the "comments" will be like?
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The point is to let people do politics on the few non-garbage results that remain. Granted, all the meaningful political opponents have been manually erased from google and only pages that hate them come up, but I'm sure there's still work to do, and this way google can pretend that it's not their own hand holding the pen.
A secondary and MINOR benefit will be that they can use chatbot parsers to help them rank searches and possibly shove down some of the SEO garbage, a war they are clearly losing at the mo
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Exactly. I don't want to "annotate" search results, I WANT TO EXCLUDE THEM. Is that so hard for Google to understand?
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"-site:" is a thing. Just add a trailing list of sites you want excluded to your query.
Which is also how I found out that, yes, google search queries DO have a maximum length.
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Ben Silbermann? Is that you?
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The difference is probably that now you can't just "like" stuff but also annotate things like "fuck off with your garbage".
Google Revives the Ghosts of Annotation Past (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Google Revives the Ghosts of Annotation Past (Score:4)
I remember the Dissenter plug-in. That went big very quickly and Google and Mozilla killed it just as quickly.
I can already annotate them (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a bunch of extensions, and I have one of my own, which can tag URLs, including searches. And I have no desire whatsoever to see the "notes" of every bot and troll that will use this feature.
Sadly, it may impact search results and make them even worse than they are now.
I'd be better off with them returning the old search interface with in-lined filters.
Welcome to hell (Score:5, Insightful)
>>If you post a note, it should show up "within minutes," unless it's flagged for human review... When you look at all of the notes for a link, what's shown will be ranked dynamically based on things like the user's query and a note's relevance to the content on the page.
So they want to change Google search results into yet another social media hellscape with everyone upvoting or downvoting links and leaving asinine comments? If so, Bing may be ready for a comeback.
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Slashdot commenting system on every search result. You know what? I'll pop some popcorn for that.
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Yay, now we can have SEO optimized notes.
Bells and whistles (Score:5, Insightful)
Google loves adding bells and whistles that add glitter but little functionality. I don't need the ability to add a heart or an emoji of a kitten.
What I want is, when I put something in as a search term, is to find pages that contain that term. Not pages that Google's algorithm thinks I might want instead.
Re: Bells and whistles (Score:5, Funny)
Would reverse psychology help? "I am desperate to see advertisements for products and services which I shall never purchase, but must never see a pin-out diagram of a DVI connector!"
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Not hard to annotate as spam. (Score:2)
When they allow searches with a filter 'to only show annotated results', then it might have something of use since essentially anything with an allowed annotation won't be the spam keyword. Of course site owners will annotate to make it sound like not spam, so what was the point again?
Old News (Score:4, Interesting)
Google ALREADY DID THIS over a decade ago, and then KILLED IT.
Seriously, Google cannot come up with a new idea to save their lives. They just release a feature, kill it, then bring it back, kill it again, rinse and repeat until the heat death of the universe.
Just what I wanted (Score:4, Insightful)
An unpaid job to help improve Google's search engine for free.
Sorry Google, I already have an unpaid job: training Google's AI by solving captchas for free.
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The quality of my work closely matches what I'm paid to do it.
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I would be good at it, I just don't want the AI to learn anything.
Every wanted to add annotations? (Score:2)
No. End of.
Meanwhile, in the real world... (Score:3)
In the real world, brands have a new avenue to clutter up search results and create FUD about competitors.
It's certainly not going to be just a variation on Twitter's Community Notes.
So... even more clutter on the results pages ... (Score:2)
The 1990s are calling (Score:2)
I forget what it was called, but for a while people were having fun with some 3rd party site that let you add annotation to anything on the web. I didn't dabble in it myself. I'm sure it was full of "look at that dick" comments, but maybe some of it was useful. I'm pretty sure there have been a few incarnations of this from time-to-time over the years. I don't see Google's special "fool around with it then drop it" sauce will help. So in the finest tradition of Slashdot, me and no doubt many others are
Phrasing (Score:3)
Google is Going To Let You Annotate Search Results
"Google is betting you will let it hoover up yet more data about you." There, fixed.