Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results • Hacker News Board

Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results

#131

Post by kingcub » Thu, Jan 06, 2011, 5:39 PM UTC

SimonPStevens wrote: post #77

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…

I think you are ignoring a very obvious fact, those 1% that are no longer 'complaining' are really doing so in an automated fashion with their blacklists. Further I think the complaints will be even better because people are more inclined to a fix a problem if it is easy to do so (adding it to their blacklist) than sending an email saying please remove this from my search results (and hoping it gets removed in the future), or doing an ad-hoc in browser solution that does not give feed back to google.

What I think really needs to be exploited is a ring of trust type aspect, I'd like to have the Hackernews ring where all us on here work together to remove the spam from our results and let's Google see what are taking out, maybe that will help them improve their algorithms.

Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results

#132

Post by CWIZO » Thu, Jan 06, 2011, 5:39 PM UTC

moe wrote: post #99

bromley wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hundreds of millions of searches and visitors in aggregate: yes. Hundreds of millions of searches and visitors in any one keyword niche: not so often. Many websites live off a handful of visitors a day coming from a few core keywords and associated long-tail traffic. For a keyword that only gets 100 searches a day, it wouldn't take many down-votes to affect the rankings of the relevant sites.

For a keyword that only gets 100 searches a day, it wouldn't take many down-votes to affect the rankings of the relevant sites. Why do you assume a flawed implementation? Naturally there would be thresholds. There is no reason to devalue a site that's only displayed in 100 search-results/day at all. The sites we want to hit are orders of magnitude worse at polluting the results. We're talking about the Mahalo's and e…

Is experts-exchange really a spam site? I always thought they had real users who ask&answer questions. But that they are just a crap site that hides this behind a paywall (I'm aware that the actual content is at the bottom of the page).

Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results

#133

Post by svlla » Thu, Jan 06, 2011, 5:40 PM UTC

I'd like to see an option for searching only ad-free sites, or perhaps just sites that don't use AdSense, as well. Surely Google would have no problem with that.

Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results

#134

Post by jeffg1 » Thu, Jan 06, 2011, 5:43 PM UTC

It doesn't seem like it would be hard, but if the rankings aren't driven by money, then there will be attempts to game the system. The problem I feel is Money. As long as everyone has to compete for it (meaning money doesn't work for the people, people work for money - in a system owned by the few), we'll have shady marketers, shady products, spammers etc... so, I think that it will remain a cat and mouse game.

Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results

#135

Post by kgc » Thu, Jan 06, 2011, 5:45 PM UTC

AndrewO wrote: post #104

I see a lot of people asking what happens when a group of people downvote a site just to ruin its ranking. Sure that's a problem, but there's an easy solution on Google's end: your blacklist only affects you. Yes, that means all of us have to hide efreedom ourselves. Doesn't seem like a problem to me... Plus, we are talking about a company whose core business demands that it can identify groups of bad-faith voters. G…

I think this could be modeled after Gmail's social spam filter.

Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results

#136

Post by moe » Thu, Jan 06, 2011, 5:51 PM UTC

jawn wrote: post #127

moe wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would also be a significant undertaking if the down-votes are tied to google accounts. 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.

Gmail accounts and capcha solving services are cheap compared to the profits you could make off of getting your site ranked #1 for a profitable search keyword.

Not necessarily when you factor in that you may need tens of thousands of accounts to suppress one popular site. - And in a profitable niche you're likely competing with multiple sites.

Keeping all those accounts active, cycling out dead accounts etc. could take quite an ongoing infrastructure investment.

Moreover google could give significantly more weight to accounts that look very real (i.e. actively using multiple google products for a long time) and thereby further devalue the botnet impact.

It's yet another arms race of course. But one with fairly good odds I would think.

Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results

#137

Post by twir » Thu, Jan 06, 2011, 6:00 PM UTC

Looks like a lot of people are assuming a solution would some sort of voting system like stackexchange, etc.

Why not allow individual users to hide sites from their own search results and save the info in their google account? For example, provide a "hide this site from my results" link next to each result. Each person decides which site they don't want to see and SEO and global results remain unaffected.

Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results

#138

Post by tel » Thu, Jan 06, 2011, 6:03 PM UTC

pragmatic wrote: post #68

Proof 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)

Or maybe it just means that the day we can algorithmically emulate human intelligence is the day spam becomes useful (or the day we get impossibly good at fooling ourselves).

Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results

#139

Post by balakk » Thu, Jan 06, 2011, 6:05 PM UTC

How about decentralizing the search page? Hear me out for a bit.

My theory is that these complaints are coming from specific interest groups, not the general public. For example, spammy-content is created and targeted at a developer/programmer audience, and that is the source of some of these complaints.

So my suggestion is Google should platformize their search; and give out dedicated search instances to specific communities. The community should have enough levers to govern/influence what is spam or not. In addition, the community can promote certain high-value resources, which are otherwise unfairly listed in search results. Invite some high-profile communities for a test-run, and let the communities make their own choices.

The public Google can still handle the general public. This can also bring in some transparency in the way spam is determined.

Re: Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results

#140

Post by troutwine » Thu, Jan 06, 2011, 6:08 PM UTC

bad_user wrote: post #125

troutwine wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think changing the wording will solve the problem entirely. On the rare occasion that my wife receives spam via gmail she'll simply archive it. The action to hide an email you never did or no longer do care about is so common and so easily accessed by a well-learned key cut that it doesn't occur to her to do otherwise until after the fact; she is well aware that marking spam improve spam filtering, of course.

I just told my wife: think of that button as being "Report Abuse". She's been applying it ever since quite efficiently.

Oh, for sure. My wife knows what the button _does_ down into the very statistical application of it. I think in her case the issue is a UX problem: it is much easier to archive than it is to report spam. Gmail also makes it far more common to archive, as well.

Shift+e for "report spam" would be perfect. Same key, just a bit chorded.