[deleted]
Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results
41–50 of 217 posts
Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results
#42Google were experimenting with voting on results: http://techcrunch.com/2007/11/28/straight-out-of-left-field-... Also there is this form for reporting spam sites: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport Integrating the above into standard search results would be difficult unless it was restricted to users with a good "karma". That might be possible in our increasingly socially networked world
The thing is, the SO scrapers like efreedom aren't spam, strictly speaking. It's just that they clone existing content without adding value, and as such are just noise in the results.
Perhaps we need to frame the discussion differently, considering what the searcher wants, rather than "spam-free hits".
Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results
#43[deleted]
I believe blekko does
Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results
#44I think the worst culprits are the ones that skim StackOverflow questions and rehash them into their own supposed original "question and answer" site
What do you think most StackOverflow answers are? It's a karma-paid labor pool where you can post questions and a lot of under-employed people will rush out and do the necessary Google searches, collating and slightly rewriting the results to yield the most votes.
Everyone is ripping off someone's content.
And just to be accurate here, SO content is creative commons (created by the community). Are those just cheap words?
Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results
#45Google were experimenting with voting on results: http://techcrunch.com/2007/11/28/straight-out-of-left-field-... Also there is this form for reporting spam sites: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport Integrating the above into standard search results would be difficult unless it was restricted to users with a good "karma". That might be possible in our increasingly socially networked world
The thing is, the SO scrapers like efreedom aren't spam, strictly speaking. It's just that they clone existing content without adding value, and as such are just noise in the results. Perhaps we need to frame the discussion differently, considering what the searcher wants, rather than "spam-free hits".
That was my point really. I don't want to see eFreedom hits, I consider them spammy, so I'd like to be able to click-ban them from my results.
If Google use that information to gradually adjust their ranking overall, then fair enough -- won't affect me, I can't see them anyway.
EDIT: Even if they don't let that affect everyone else's results (because of gaming), then I still don't care, I still don't see the crap in my results ever again.
Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results
#46I think the worst culprits are the ones that skim StackOverflow questions and rehash them into their own supposed original "question and answer" site
Jeff Atwood discusses this in his most recent Coding Horror blog post ( http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/01/trouble-in-the-hous... ), in which he states that he doesn't really mind people copying StackOverflow questions (and answers), but that he does mind that the copies get a higher Google ranking than the original.
How does that happen though? efreedom must be doing something special with SEO to get higher than SO given that SO must have huge page rank score.
Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results
#47I'd ban eHow.
And mahalo.
Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results
#48That will never happen, if they ever did that it would be an admission that there is something inherently wrong with their algorithm. They won't do it.
Nah. They let people 'report spam' in gmail -- they're happy to admit that algorithm doesn't always guess right. Also there's already a "give us feedback" mechanism for reporting bad search results, it's just too slow and manual.
People are used to spam buttons, and would realize that the lack of "report spam" would mean that Google might be marking too many things as spam if they think the user doesn't need a "Mark as spam" button.
People are also a lot less tolerable of spam in their inbox than they are of irrelevant search results.
Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results
#49Maybe this could be implemented in the way of sticky search operators?
So for example, I could define -site:efreedom.com as an operator to be applied silently for every search I make.
Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results
#50For those wanting Google to put a penalty on the sites who are banned/removed from the user's view, what's to stop someone from gaming that system via Mech. Turk (or some other way)? Just pay people $0.12 to open gmail accounts and ban a competitor or whatever.
That's the only negative I can think of - other than that, I say bring it!