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Indeed any metric that can be influenced will end up being gamed. Voting would likely require being logged in which is not so good for the more privacy orienta

Indeed any metric that can be influenced will end up being gamed. Voting would likely require being logged in which is not so good for the more privacy orientated search engines. Could flip the idea on its head and look at ways to verify the owner of a site/page (again, with privacy issues associated), and use that as a quality metric.

pharmakom 5y ago
Google already has great spam control and bot detection for serving ads though. They dont care about privacy (except in so far as it hurts the brand).
- z3t4 5y ago
  Detecting bots is very hard, and there are a lot of bots on Google Adsense. They could however add "captcha codes" for clicking on ads/links search results which would prevent bots, but users would likely find it annoying.
speedgoose 5y ago
Google knows already which link you click and can estimate how long you visit a website when you click another link or do a new search.
- quantumofalpha 5y ago
  Exactly. Click = upvote. Returning to SERP after a short dwell time = downvote. It's noisy but because you can mine such things implicitly by just logging user's behavior, the volume of data is way bigger than what an explicit feedback system can provide.
d110af5ccf 5y ago
> verify the owner of a site/page To what end? A verified real identity could post crap. Meanwhile an anonymous actor could publish gems. It comes down to how much trust you place in a given publisher; that currently goes by domain. The only thing verified identity buys you is the ability to trust snippets from that person published across a variety of untrusted domains. Meanwhile, analyzing per-account feedback patterns along with other session behavior significantly raises the bar for abuse.
- ricardo81 5y ago
  Would generally agree about the anonymous example. The general idea would be that people are harder to fake as a signal than links. A lot of sites associate social profiles with their domain/page. Something like a topical author Pagerank would be interesting, with endorsements. That too, of course could be bought and gamed. Pagerank was a game changer when it arrived, essentially acting as a 'vote' for a page, where some votes are more important than others. Associating votes with people (like the OP thought) is interesting.
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    >The general idea would be that people are harder to fake as a signal than links. I don't think it would be as hard as you think. There are already "captcha farms" in India and Bangladesh - "Identity farms" would be just as simple to set up.
  - weird-eye-issue 5y ago
    Very easy to game, actually it already is gamed in a couple different ways. One method - let's say you have a site about nutrition, you could find a doctor who wants to improve their search rankings (or find an agency that works with doctors to improve their rankings). Ask to put them on your website as the author or editor with a link back to their site. It's a win for both parties and Google can't really detect that since it isn't a two way link scheme.

pharmakom 5y ago

Google already has great spam control and bot detection for serving ads though. They dont care about privacy (except in so far as it hurts the brand).

z3t4 5y ago
Detecting bots is very hard, and there are a lot of bots on Google Adsense. They could however add "captcha codes" for clicking on ads/links search results which would prevent bots, but users would likely find it annoying.

speedgoose 5y ago

Google knows already which link you click and can estimate how long you visit a website when you click another link or do a new search.

quantumofalpha 5y ago
Exactly. Click = upvote. Returning to SERP after a short dwell time = downvote. It's noisy but because you can mine such things implicitly by just logging user's behavior, the volume of data is way bigger than what an explicit feedback system can provide.

d110af5ccf 5y ago

> verify the owner of a site/page To what end? A verified real identity could post crap. Meanwhile an anonymous actor could publish gems. It comes down to how much trust you place in a given publisher; that currently goes by domain. The only thing verified identity buys you is the ability to trust snippets from that person published across a variety of untrusted domains. Meanwhile, analyzing per-account feedback patterns along with other session behavior significantly raises the bar for abuse.

ricardo81 5y ago
Would generally agree about the anonymous example. The general idea would be that people are harder to fake as a signal than links. A lot of sites associate social profiles with their domain/page. Something like a topical author Pagerank would be interesting, with endorsements. That too, of course could be bought and gamed. Pagerank was a game changer when it arrived, essentially acting as a 'vote' for a page, where some votes are more important than others. Associating votes with people (like the OP thought) is interesting.
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  >The general idea would be that people are harder to fake as a signal than links. I don't think it would be as hard as you think. There are already "captcha farms" in India and Bangladesh - "Identity farms" would be just as simple to set up.
- weird-eye-issue 5y ago
  Very easy to game, actually it already is gamed in a couple different ways. One method - let's say you have a site about nutrition, you could find a doctor who wants to improve their search rankings (or find an agency that works with doctors to improve their rankings). Ask to put them on your website as the author or editor with a link back to their site. It's a win for both parties and Google can't really detect that since it isn't a two way link scheme.