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Funny and I see your point. However, the catch is that treating them as merely documents rather than human beings and also thinking you could whip up a codable

Funny and I see your point. However, the catch is that treating them as merely documents rather than human beings and also thinking you could whip up a codable algorithm to rank them would be exactly the sort of mistake I'd most expect Google to make. To give just the easiest and most recent example of how that approach breaks: the increasing deluge of content farms and SEO spam in Google results. Many folks consider that non-optimal but Google defends it because their data "tells them" it's optimal. Now picture that approach with people. Rank things by some measurement and only things that measure well by that metric will rank high, shutting you out of great opportunities. The false negative, etc. Related anti-pattern is the concept of Local Maxima.

spacemanaki 16y ago
> but Google defends it because their data "tells them" it's optimal. C'mon, I'm not one to usually come rushing to Google's aid, but from Matt Cutts' comments on HN and recent blog posts on the official blog is seems to me that they are working hard on this problem, which would imply they don't think the status quo is optimal.
- mkramlich 16y ago
  I understand. However, I've seen public comment by Google folks that basically conveyed the idea that it was optimal -- by certain standards. Granted, they have many people and opinions can differ and vary over time. Secondly, it should be possible to do something as simple as filter out obvious content farm sites in under a week tops. Or give all users a quick and easy to do it. Perhaps have a default blacklist of known content farmers, and then give users the option to remove things from the blacklist when doing their own searches. You might be dealing with a huge company if something as simple as this takes 20k employees more than a week, tops, to put into production. And I'm being generous with the week estimate, because it could be done even faster than that under more agile conditions. And a 'default blacklist of known content farmers' is not even the only solution which could be implemented quickly, you could also do something like add another variable to the PageRank algorithm which has a down weighing effect on any page under a domain known to be a content farmer/spammer. Supposedly, they are already doing this (IIRC) but again, the basic idea could be implemented and put into production quickly, if it hasn't already.
jfoutz 16y ago
I think it would be tougher to game the multi-day google interview process than it is to game the search results.

spacemanaki 16y ago

> but Google defends it because their data "tells them" it's optimal. C'mon, I'm not one to usually come rushing to Google's aid, but from Matt Cutts' comments on HN and recent blog posts on the official blog is seems to me that they are working hard on this problem, which would imply they don't think the status quo is optimal.

mkramlich 16y ago
I understand. However, I've seen public comment by Google folks that basically conveyed the idea that it was optimal -- by certain standards. Granted, they have many people and opinions can differ and vary over time. Secondly, it should be possible to do something as simple as filter out obvious content farm sites in under a week tops. Or give all users a quick and easy to do it. Perhaps have a default blacklist of known content farmers, and then give users the option to remove things from the blacklist when doing their own searches. You might be dealing with a huge company if something as simple as this takes 20k employees more than a week, tops, to put into production. And I'm being generous with the week estimate, because it could be done even faster than that under more agile conditions. And a 'default blacklist of known content farmers' is not even the only solution which could be implemented quickly, you could also do something like add another variable to the PageRank algorithm which has a down weighing effect on any page under a domain known to be a content farmer/spammer. Supposedly, they are already doing this (IIRC) but again, the basic idea could be implemented and put into production quickly, if it hasn't already.

jfoutz 16y ago

I think it would be tougher to game the multi-day google interview process than it is to game the search results.