101–110 of 217 posts
I'd ban eHow.
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Not all spam is so obvious, both in email and search results. These are all assumptions, but I think it's safe to say the average person identifies the email 'Grow your Pe Nis like a Woman' (true story) as spam. However, the less obvious 'Enter to win a trip to Hawaii' still fools many people. Think about how effective the 'I am a Nigerian Prince that needs help out of my country and then I will give you 1.2 million…
Frankly, I'm not fussed whether the majority of users would use it right. I posted this as an entirely self-serving request for a way to make my results cleaner. Also: If the majority of users do like eHow, then that's a sign it's not spam. But a lot of 'power users' consider it spam. This is an argument FOR personalised blacklists, not against them.
Plus, we are talking about a company whose core business demands that it can identify groups of bad-faith voters. Given time, they may find a way to incorporate this data safely into the ranking data (if anyone could, it would be Google).
And I know there are extensions to do this (mine mysteriously stopped working recently), but doing this on the client-side in a way that's bound to a single browser install just seems wrong to me, especially for Google.
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And mahalo.
And ExpertsExchage and About.com
No, 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?
And when it's about search result. People are browsing and clicking through adsense filled "landing page sites". Most of them think that it's their fault that they couldn't find the thing they were searching for.
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Do you think this could be improved by alternate wording? Instead of reporting 'spam', ask the user 'was this useful?' or 'did you want this?'. After all, the real goal is giving people a better, more relevant experience, detecting and removing spam is just one facet of that. Whether it's email or search.
In general yes, I think improved UI can guide user behaviour to more desirable outcomes. However I don't think it's as simple as changing the button text. Even a process driven UI, like a wizard style interface where you have to click next to progress through each step might work, but users very quickly become immune to dialogs. They don't read them, they just evolve the actions that get them to their goal the fastes…
Let it learn what I think is a good result for my needs.
If you make it a little bit social, make sure you weight other people's opinions by how much they agree with my own in other areas (making it harder for sockpuppets to muddy the waters)
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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.
Not only do you have to bypass the captcha, but also the heuristics that google could (does?) employ to detect fake accounts.
If the votes were weighted by account activity then the spammers would not only have to sign up and vote; they would also have to keep all these accounts busy with fake queries or other means.
No, 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…
The problem must be solved for all (or at least the majority) of users. Perfection being the enemy of good enough, and a common and valued and traditional mechanism to delay product shipment. And Google might well be able to utilize information from that 1% of users that have sorted that out - 1% of a Really Big Number of searches, factoring for the folks looking to game the search results (downward, in this case) -…