I'd ban eHow.
And mahalo.
And ExpertsExchage and About.com
Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results
71–80 of 217 posts
Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wo…
Except that thare are some genuinely useful compilations on SO which you don't get elsewhere, e.g.: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/72394/what-should-a-devel... These add significant value to the original content IMO
Of course there are. It is a community and discussions can be interesting.
However most of the time that I and most people come across SO it's the top search hit for a technical question. The answers are seldom unique, but instead are usually pulled almost word for word from the online manual for the same.
That is overwhelmingly the value of SO -- it benefits by collecting aggregated content from all over the web. It is, hilariously, by design exactly what many in here are complaining about. In that case instead of an automated process it's a mechanical turk.
Hey I don't care because it gets me my answer, but I can see the hilarious paradox in some of the complaints.
I was once searching on a problem -- one that I had faced years earlier but had then forgotten -- and the top link was a SO QA. The answer sounded oddly familiar, when I remembered that it was actually from a blog entry I had posted two years prior.
Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results
#73How many gmail accounts do we need to band together to lower the rank of stack overflow against our super-duper question-and-answer site QandAdsWithMe.annoying.com?
An excellent point. Blacklisting works both ways, and there's nothing stopping spammers from creating hundreds, maybe thousands, or even more, of throwaway Google accounts just to blacklist the original site. Sure, the logged in Google users wouldn't see the spam site (if they blacklisted it), but it would still appear, and outrank the original site, in standard search results for those that aren't logged in.
So don't use the blacklisting stats for re-ranking everyone else's then. I didn't consider that when I put the post up. An instant way to filter sites just for yourself would solve 90% of people's complaints straight away.
Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
An extremely easy way for a bunch of people to get together and destroy someone's ranking? That doesn't sound like such a good idea.
Perhaps, but I'm sure any legitimate site could contact Google and resolve the issue...
Sounds like a support headache. I'd love the feature but I don't blame Google for not just rushing out and adding this.
Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results
#75Yes that would be good. They could then look at the number of people blocking certain domains and de-weight them in the global results. Traditionally google seem against human powered editing (as this would be), but I think as the black hat SEOs run rings around them, its needed badly .
An extremely easy way for a bunch of people to get together and destroy someone's ranking? That doesn't sound like such a good idea.
Given that Google gets hundred of millions of search and visitors, then you'll need a hundred of thousands of down votes to get black-listed. No black hatter can really do that (create a 100K account/IP to avoid Google radar and down vote the website).
Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results
#76Proof that true AI is a long way off? If the best and brightest (arguably) on the planet can't figure out how to filter out search with algorithms, what makes us think we can mimic true human intelligence any time soon. (I think it will happen, just not as soon as some claim)
We are already able to (badly) mimic true human intelligence. The problem is when our mimics compete with humans in general contexts. There, being smarter means you can cream the competition.
Basically, it's the difference between PvP and PvE.
Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results
#77No, it's not particular hard, but it will make the problem worse.
Why?
99% of users are non-tech oriented.
Those users will not really be aware of the specific problems with the search results, they won't understand the concept of a good vs bad result and they certainly won't bother to tweak/ban/filter their results.
The 1% that do care and are currently being vocal about it will start filtering their results and they will perceive that the problem is solved. They will stop making a fuss.
So now, the complaints have gone away, but 99% of users are still using the broken system, so the good sites that create good original content are still ranking below the scrapers and spam results for 99% of the users.
The problem must be solved for all (or at least the majority) of users.
(And you can't take the 1%s filtering and apply it to all users in some kind of social search because the spammers will just join the 1% and game the system)
Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results
#78Yes that would be good. They could then look at the number of people blocking certain domains and de-weight them in the global results. Traditionally google seem against human powered editing (as this would be), but I think as the black hat SEOs run rings around them, its needed badly .
This would only work if 1) it was sufficiently painful to put in a block for your searches and 2) this had no effect on global results.
1) - It doesn't have to be extremely painful, just painful enough, such that true loathing is needed as motivation. This way, we filter out frivolous decisions. A few seconds pause would be enough.
2) - We need to let the reduced ad revenue do the job for us through the market. Anything else will be gamed much to everyone's detriment. Just empower people to remove the annoyance, and let the money do its thing.
Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
An extremely easy way for a bunch of people to get together and destroy someone's ranking? That doesn't sound like such a good idea.
Given that Google gets hundred of millions of search and visitors, then you'll need a hundred of thousands of down votes to get black-listed. No black hatter can really do that (create a 100K account/IP to avoid Google radar and down vote the website).
Most botnets would easily have more than that number of computers.
So yeah it can be done.
Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results
#80No, it's not particular hard, but it will make the problem worse. Why? 99% of users are non-tech oriented. Those users will not really be aware of the specific problems with the search results, they won't understand the concept of a good vs bad result and they certainly won't bother to tweak/ban/filter their results. The 1% that do care and are currently being vocal about it will start filtering their results and the…
Do you think 99% of users are too stupid to click 'report spam' when they get a spam email?