Why is http://www.deadmau5.com/ marked as spam?? Its obviously not.
It looks like they have a considerable number of false positives. Another site, jet2.com is the website of a low cost airline; wp-plugins.net is hosting Wordpress plugins.
Blekko already has a list of domains to block from results
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Re: Blekko already has a list of domains to block from results
#12There are quite a few false positives on that list. Also titling sites with nocrawl as spam is pretty lame. dshield.org is listed as mfa, but there isn't an adsense ad on it.
Re: Blekko already has a list of domains to block from results
#13Wow, I'm seeing tons of false positives. Why on earth is the co-written blog of a nobel laureate and a 7th circuit appeals court judge making blekko's bayesian classifier freak out?
#88 - http://www.becker-posner-blog.com - bayes (spam 31.6 > 5.3)
Re: Blekko already has a list of domains to block from results
#14If they put johnchow.com on the list, they must be doing something right.
Re: Blekko already has a list of domains to block from results
#15Why is http://www.deadmau5.com/ marked as spam?? Its obviously not.
It looks like they have a considerable number of false positives. Another site, jet2.com is the website of a low cost airline; wp-plugins.net is hosting Wordpress plugins.
Maybe looking for numbers in the domain name? It's probably a really good signal overall.
Re: Blekko already has a list of domains to block from results
#16Wow, I'm seeing tons of false positives. Why on earth is the co-written blog of a nobel laureate and a 7th circuit appeals court judge making blekko's bayesian classifier freak out? #88 - http://www.becker-posner-blog.com - bayes (spam 31.6 > 5.3)
Really, a seemingly content-heavy site with no ads to serve, why?
Re: Blekko already has a list of domains to block from results
#17Wouldn't it be better to let people do their own blacklists, and then incorporate that into their official list if a percentage of people have that site down as spam?
Re: Blekko already has a list of domains to block from results
#18I have been using Blekko as my primary search-engine for a couple of days now, and in my experience their search-results are very decent.
Not, maybe in terms of falsely blocked sites, but certainly in terms of having fewer false positives (e.g. spam/useless pages) in the search results.
Mom & pop users (and even more advanced searchers, such as students looking for book-reviews, or torrents) might very well forgive them the few false blocks for this.
Zittrain in his 'The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It' already wrote about this trade-off in terms of spam being made possible by the generativity of the internet, and people increasingly preferring controlled environments over those full of virusses and spam (wonder why apple's locked down devices are so popular?).
Of course this has big downsides too, and even is bad in my opinion. But Blekko, by allowing people to create their own slashtags (categories, much more flexible and quick than Googles domain search) and google/yahoo/bing always being only one click away, might have arrived at a good middle-ground...
Imho Blekko might very well be able to beat Google at their own game. Give them a try, or at least sometimes when google doesn't do it for you, I'd say...
Re: Blekko already has a list of domains to block from results
#19In spite of the (justified) complains you get about the false positives, I think that's a great way to go. Unlike with email where missing a message might be critical, in search I'd rather have even as much as 10-20% false positives than deal with the spam sites Google delivers.
More in general, concerning the front page search examples: "cure for headaches" works very well indeed compared to google. However, "global warming /liberal" is a bit irritating. I understand the rationale behind it, however there is this slight difference between finding only what one is looking for and hearing only what one wants to hear. To find anything non-mainstream might necessitate a technique like this in Google where you otherwise don't see anything else in the first 50 results... But maybe you can strive to find for me what's really going on and not merely what's mainstream and politically correct. Thinking about it, your blocking of domains like Answer.com might be a great step in that direction anyway.
Re: Blekko already has a list of domains to block from results
#20Wouldn't it be better to let people do their own blacklists, and then incorporate that into their official list if a percentage of people have that site down as spam?
No, that would actually be an easy system to exploit: create a million accounts with your competitors in it, watch how the search engine blocks it.