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

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

#111

Post by moe » Thu, Jan 06, 2011, 4:37 PM UTC

mtkd wrote: post #64

Pewpewarrows wrote: post #36

Gmail already does it, and the global system uses an algorithm to look at reported spam results in order to automatically move future emails from that party to the spam folder automatically, not just for the person that reported it, but for everyone. If they're not looking into integrating that nicely into the existing search results page (not a separate form that the average user will never find or use), especially…

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.

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

#112

Post by al_james » Thu, Jan 06, 2011, 4:40 PM UTC

eli wrote: post #53

al_james wrote: post #7

Yes 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.

True, but as it stands, someone's ranking can be destroyed by not playing the black hat SEO game when your competitors are and allowing their crappy spam filled site to outrank you. Swings and roundabouts.

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

#113

Post by CWuestefeld » Thu, Jan 06, 2011, 4:47 PM UTC

bradly wrote: post #71

slig wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And mahalo.

And ExpertsExchage and About.com

I don't get the hating on About.com. There are sub-sites there that I actually read intentionally, e.g., http://heavymetal.about.com/

This sure looks to me like real, original content.

EDIT: how about the courtesy of an explanation for the downvote?

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

#114

Post by pilom » Thu, Jan 06, 2011, 4:49 PM UTC

Startup idea: Create a service around google custom search. Select the "Search the entire web but emphasize the selected sites" Then create a gui to allow people to prioritize or ban their search results.

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

#115

Post by troutwine » Thu, Jan 06, 2011, 4:51 PM UTC

seabee wrote: post #89

SimonPStevens wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not "too stupid" no. I think 99% of email users have not been adequately trained in why or how they should report spam, and even if they were I think most of them would still not care enough to actually do it with any regularity. When pushed many may acknowledge that they know it exists, they will probably even be able to find the button when asked if given a chance. But they won't remember to do it when they see spa…

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.

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.

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

#116

Post by 3pt14159 » Thu, Jan 06, 2011, 4:51 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…

>99% of users are non-tech oriented.

I disagree. Let's call it 95%.

>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.

So have only people that have enabled the advanced features of Google search ban sites. All of a sudden only people that "get it" are the ones that can ban.

>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.

So we need to use the votes to stop the spammers.

>(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)

Sure you can. If you couldn't then Reddit would be a wasteland of adds, but it isn't. They only have 4 or 5 engineers there and they can write code that will stop vote rings, let alone Google.

It's actually a pretty simple exercise to stop vote rings, unless the anti-vote ring code is open sourced, but even there it should be possible.

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

#117

Post by Tichy » Thu, Jan 06, 2011, 4:57 PM UTC

Didn't Google have downvotes for results - shouldn't they be sufficient to achieve the result you want? Presumably Google would learn that you consistently downvote wareseeker and exclude it from results in the future.

I haven't used it because I don't want Google to remember my search history. But if you are willing to stay logged into Google (which would be required for your proposal), it would not be an issue.

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

#118

Post by ergo98 » Thu, Jan 06, 2011, 4:59 PM UTC

robryan wrote: post #97

ergo98 wrote: post #44

Earlier 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…

stackoverflow consistently provides high quality answers though. If someone was to come along, take the creative commons material and present it in a way that actually improved my experience of finding the answer I was after I'd be all for it. In my experience though the sites that are taking the content are ad ridden messes which remove value rather than add anything.

Totally agree with that. There is an opportunity for someone to take the content and actually improve on it somehow (e.g. an expert engine or something, or better machine driven ontological navigation, etc), however it thus far its just been improving the SEO of it.

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

#119

Post by bromley » Thu, Jan 06, 2011, 5:00 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…

Google seems to like building systems that automatically scale across all keywords and niches.

For example, for a low competition keyword, 1 link can make a big difference to a site's rankings. For a high-competition keyword it takes many many more links to change anything. It's the same algorithm affecting the rankings in both cases, just in the latter case there's a lot more data being used as input.

That's the way they seem to do things, so I'm guessing there's a fair chance they'd take a similar approach to the influence of down-votes on rankings, if they went down that road.

There'd have to have some sorts of thresholds, but there'll always be points above which the algorithm can be gamed, just like pretty much every other aspect of their ranking algorithm can be gamed.

Right now, in a low-volume-keyword niche, a sleazy operator can kill the rankings of competing sites pretty easily by buying them a few dirty links and letting Google's algorithm do the rest. If a site hasn't got lots of quality links pointing to it, and let's face it, the vast majority of sites don't, it's pretty easy for someone to kill its rankings.

A lot of people say that it's impossible to affect the rankings of someone else's site, but that's simply not true. You can't easily affect the rankings of a big established site with lots of good links, but a little small-business site? The reality is it's pretty easy. I don't think Google have any interest in quashing that particular myth, because the reality is actually kind of scary for small business operating on the web.

(Apologies if I'm going off on a tangent there. You are absolutely right in pointing out that I was assuming a flawed implementation.)

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

#120

Post by stcredzero » Thu, Jan 06, 2011, 5:01 PM UTC

nervechannel wrote: post #81

stcredzero wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Anyth…

Re 2, yes. A lot of people have reacted as if I suggested letting people affect everybody else's results. I'm not convinced that's possible to do safely, I'd be happy just to see it for my own results. Re 1, painful? WTF? The whole point is to make it quick and usable. I can already blacklist sites the painful way, by adding them to a Google Custom Search page. The whole point is I'd like a quick add-to-killfile butt…

Yes, #1 - very slightly painful. Not terribly painful, but just a pinch. Maybe something like a 2 second wait. It has to cost more than an instant and doing that also makes it a bit more of a pain to game with scripts.