Google Experimental Search with Digg Style voting
Straight from google experimental labs, they’re experimenting on search engine ranking which can be influenced by users via a “vote” (sort of like digg).
This experiment lets you influence your search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results. When you search for the same keywords again, you’ll continue to see those changes. If you later want to revert your changes, you can undo any modifications you’ve made.
It seems like google want to harness the power and knowledge of the huge google userbase. Well, it might be a cheaper approach rather than hire thousands of people to manually do “quality testing” of their SERPS.
I don’t think however that this will make a huge difference in google’s “actual results” (the results that you get when you are not logged in to google). It was stated in their website that one needs to be logged-in for them to see the changes.
Google however can use this “knowledge” to tweak its actual search engine results . I mean, if google can track that 100 or so users prefer a certain website for a given search term, then there might be a good reason to increase that website’s ranking.
Consequently, I’m smelling a new wave attack from search engine spammer scripts that would just click on a spam site to “vote for it” until it reaches the first page of google.
But then again, this is just one of the so many factors that google’s algorithm will consider. Google engineers can always tweak the weight of this factor and its effect on the overall ranking of that webpage.
How about you? Do you think it’s a good idea for google to implement this?
I stil think the best voting system is the digit based system like on http://www.opentopix.com
Nice idea, but how are they going to control people hijacking the system to make deliberate inferences on Google
We don’t really know if it’s going to be a good or bad thing if this feature ever gets around to being implemented. They have to experiment with it more to see if it really works well or not. I could imagine the exploiter spammers ruining everything by boosting their site ratings with some new prog. We’ll see if Google can manage to overcome all those thousands of potential threats to the feature’s functionality.
dont they trust their spiders & algorithms?
Why not give the user the choice? They could have a slider next to the Search button in the Advanced Search area. On one end, it could say “Bias toward algorithm” and on the other, “Bias toward human votes”.
This way you could get search results that reflect either.
Or you could have a check box that says “Display both human and algorithm results,” and instead of one column of search results, you’d have two columns. In the left column would by algoright, and the right would be human voting.
May be a little hard to display both columns AND google ads on a small monitor, but if you are like me and have a 20″ monitor there is plenty of space.
Nice, a co-worker of mine IM me this page. You got a post high up on Digg. Is the author Noel B? Good find Noel. Anything by B5Media seems to impress me all the time. Which makes me a fan of Jayvee too.
Isn’t this more user specific and not intended for global changes? It seems to me it is like turning off safesearch. It doesn’t effect anyone except yourself.
I believe the quote:
“When you search for the same keywords again, you’ll continue to see those changes. If you later want to revert your changes, you can undo any modifications you’ve made.”
Sums it up.
You guys seem to miss the point. Google currently only has plans for this to be a client side feature, many people use the same search terms every time they browse to get to a particular website; rather than favouriting or remembering the URL. This allows people to move the one they normal click on up the listing.
votes are a nice feature but I wonder what checks and audits are in place by Google.
One way to curb spammers would be to only allow members who have been registered for a predetermined amount of time (ie..1 year+). While it wouldn’t stop the cheats completely it would drastically reduce their odds of gaming the system on a serious scale.
There are other methods as well such as monitoring the ip addresses of those participating and perhaps even giving less weight to large numbers of votes that come from specific ip ranges.
I have little doubt that Google is capable of monitoring the results and making decisions that marginalize the attempts of such spammers.
This is definitely a sign of things to come in my opinion and that’s a good thing. Anything that encourages users to participate and actually gives their opinions weight is as we all know, very effective for “stickiness”.
Google’s rank system is based on a personal preference. At least initially, you will personalize your ranking of the search engine results. It’s a good concept by Google, but unless everyone participates then the results will likely be skewed.
control spam by validating results by trusted, explicit friends networks that set your influence from only others you allow. No one can make you friend a spammer.
where do you sign up for this experiment?
@stevemichael: OpenTopix is just a rip of Digg.com
This could be a very cool move by Google to put them on top even further.
Soon we will read all over the internet: “How to get voted on Google”
or “How to become a top Googler”
i agree with other comments..spamming and hijacking are serious threats to the system if this feature being implemented.
hmmm…i am all for change but i am not sure how i feel about this change