Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dear Google: please let me ban sites from results

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 217 posts

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

#141

Post by teach »

twir wrote: post #137

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.

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Am I the only one that remembers this EXACT feature on Google about a year ago? You had to be logged in to iGoogle, and each search result had a small [X] to the right of it that would appear on hover.

If you clicked it, that result wouldn't appear for you again. I used it all the time.

Then, lately it's gone. Maybe I was part of a small, randomly-selected test group?

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

#142

Post by Travis »

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…

We can also look to the AdBlock extension. They have prefilled lists that you can customize, so it's a "shared ecosystem" that you subscribe to, then customize yourself.

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

#143

Post by roc »

CWIZO wrote: post #132
moe wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

That sounds like trying to excuse junkmail and spam because someone out there finds it useful and orders the products being offered.

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

#146

Post by roc »

moe wrote: post #111
mtkd wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how you could anti-game this, the SEOs would just use mechanical turk to hire 100s of people (with valid Google Accounts) to do the reporting. At best G could use the information as a list of potential spammers and filter domains manually, but I really can't see this being automated without giving the SEOs another weapon.

I don't think anyone wants to filter sites that could be gamed with "100s of votes". We want to filter sites that will require tens of thousands of votes to get rid of.

And even then it should consider the votes themselves to be suspect and watch for blocks of users who only vote in unison (qualitatively and temporally).

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

#147

Post by daviding »

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 a personal black-list would be ideal initially as those most motivated would be most helped, i.e. the majority of people who might not care about the status quo are then not impacted at all.

As mentioned above, then introducing the shared-ranking via the social graph would be the next logical step. It could be something opt-in'd to ease adoption.

Then, ideally (and this is my personal 'white whale' problem) it would be great to imagine something where the user could whitelist through no action of their own rather than have to do any work to block, i.e. use the result set 'hit' of what's clicked in the results to act as a personal ranking upvote.

There's some interesting engineering issues of per-user indexing though, but hey, you wanted to work at Google right?

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

#148

Post by emef »

coffee wrote: post #144

"This would solve a lot of people's complaints in one fell swoop." And doing this would spawn a lot of people's complaints in one fell swoop. If you owned a site, and created enemies, they could band together and flag your site as spam.

I don't think you understood his suggestion. "Banning" a site would be local to your signed-in google account, not a global ban from results (which would indeed suffer the backfire you mentioned.)

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

#149

Post by coffeedrinker »

As programmers, our typical complaints are for sites that bog us down in common (expert's exchange, stackoverflow scrapers, etc.).

What I found interesting: I was doing a search on something I normally have no interest in (a sewing machine manual for my wife) and I was amazed by the level of spam I was encountering.

We have no idea how bad the problem is for others whose topics we do not usually see. The web is far more full of spam than we even realize.

Post reply on HN