> People! Let the users help. All the best content sources on the internet are either experts or communities with voting / submissions.
There are over 1.7 billion websites [0], so the task of ranking content, the way algorithmic search engines do it in a matter of milliseconds, is not as easy as it sounds when you add humans into the mix. It would only end up the way Mahalo did [1].
False dichotomy, you can use algorithms in tandem. And cherry picking... I remember Mahalo well, and one example of one version of it doesn’t prove anything. Mahalo is far from how I’d structure it.
You can still automatically index but have users vote on the results. There are 1.7 billion websites and 3 billion+ users, and you don’t need that many to be active voters to help assist algorithms. Plus how many are at the top anyway? I’d love to downvote a ton of google results even if it only used it as a trainer for my own.
Plus, there are so many “super curation” sites like here and Reddit that provide a big dataset curated by people automatically. Lean on them more. Everyone knows “site: reddit.com” or “site:stackoverflow.com” already give you better results.
A simple upvote downvote on their results would let me downvote all the spam SEO sites. It wouldn’t take many votes for them to start tuning it.
Stats are a good way to blind yourself. That algorithms scale doesn’t mean people don’t improve them. Google’s problem is they are too cocky about algorithms, but their algorithms fail compared the curated communities all over the web already.
the other day I was searching "<sitename> feature" and from the results (which to be fair aren't many, since it was a fairly obscure site), once you get through the legit results on the site i was searching for, there were a bunch of markov generated spam things that had clearly scraped posts from various sites and tangled them together