Furthermore, I'd love to see a simple thumbs up or thumbs down system integrated...

cmurphycode · on Jan 1, 2011

Google did try this. I don't think it ever left the lab, but I used it for a while. I think they may have canned it; I just realized I haven't seen it in a while. It was called searchwiki. I think it was originally just supposed to apply to your own results, but I'm sure they analyzed the tendencies to see if it would've helful to use overall.

Honestly, such a system would be ridiculously easy to game with a botnet, so there needs to be significant work in the area beforehand.

rhizome · on Jan 1, 2011

I think the 'X" was live for maybe a month or two. I figured either or both that there was a resource/algorithm problem that prevented them from continuing in a fruitful way, or that it was a bit of user survey they could use in aggregate as preference weighting on the indexes/results. That is, not as a function of personal filtering, but to see if there were commonalities in what people considered to be bad sites. This may be further supported by the fact that the lifetime of the feature may have been too short for gamers to exploit it.

ehsanul · on Jan 1, 2011

The problem with that, is again, spam. How do you differentiate fake votes from real ones? You can do per-IP limiting, and probably other things I'm not aware of (please comment about them), but it's still pretty open to abuse I'd say.

nhangen · on Jan 1, 2011

I suppose you do it similarly to the way Amazon or iTunes implements it for reviews...you make sure the user is logged in via a Google account.

Sure, it could be exploited, and I'm guessing that's why they haven't implemented it, but there's got to be a solution that would make it work.

spidaman · on Jan 1, 2011

Google has proven to be very effective data collectors (see "What they know" stuff from WSJ e.g. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870330970457541...) - it may on the one hand be surprising they don't use this data more effectively to identify and thwart spam. OTOH, they're making a lot of money on spammy SERPs.

sukuriant · on Jan 1, 2011

Open to exploitation theoretically, or open to exploitation practically? Can we really know this until we try?

I think something like this would be a cool thing for Google to test for a year (a voting system might take a while to set up properly)

jbrennan · on Jan 1, 2011

I'd even be OK with "Thumbs Up/Down this result just for your own personal book-keeping", so that you can promote/demote results in your own search history (try searching for "_____ tutorial photoshop" and you'll get tons of splog links before you eventually hit a golden result. It'd be nice to save time later).

Google briefly had a feature like this in their results, but they've removed it. All that's left is the Star system, which isn't quite the same.

itg · on Jan 1, 2011

That can be easily gamed. We already see this with online marketing/pr companies that try to game other sites such as digg/reddit/etc.