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The lack of an ability to vote on search results seems like a baffling omission. Normally Google loves to crowdsource their work, but for this one area where we

by mcv 5y ago

The lack of an ability to vote on search results seems like a baffling omission. Normally Google loves to crowdsource their work, but for this one area where we would actually want it, they decide that they know better when they clearly don't.

djohnston 5y ago
It would be abused into the ground by the same people who set up these scam sites in the first place. For most things on the internet, the crappiness of the average person is the limiting factor.
- amelius 5y ago
  Wouldn't that provide more data on who are the scammers?
  - djohnston 5y ago
    Not really. In these areas there's a general principle that the moment you start using a signal to enforce on bad actors that signal's value decays. It's sad, I actually think web3 could help curb abuse at scale by making it too expensive to scale horizontally. Imagine paying a "stamp" to send an email on the blockchain, spam email would dramatically drop. Maybe similar mechanics could be in play for other things but then you lose democratization of information.
    - kgonza 5y ago
      What is web3? What exactly is it? And how could it be used in this case?
      - djohnston 5y ago
        The idea is you'd have an email client but all data is stored encrypted on chain and you'd have to pay tx costs to send things. By having this sort of stamp tax spammer wouldn't be able to scale mass messaging as it would bankrupt them.
        jspiral 5y ago
        in meatspace though, my real mailbox is mostly filled with spam that the sender paid to have delivered. granted, it would at least act as a limiting factor.
        Schroedingersat 5y ago
        If you have an auditable tx history, then mixers/exchanges/wallets etc can be marked as sources of the money used by spammers
- machiaweliczny 5y ago
  What if they took only votes from people that pay and have account for X time? Also what’s the problem with adding revert per user? With some events architekture it should be trivial. They could even train AI on this data to automatically sugest suspects.
  - mcv 5y ago
    It's totally fine if they only use my own votes to modify my results. In fact, if we're going to do that, I'd really like to block some sites from my search results entirely. Though ideally, I would also like to include the votes from people I trust.
  - lbriner 5y ago
    People sell good accounts for lots of money to the spammers.
    - mcv 5y ago
      And when those accounts suddenly start behaving like bad accounts, their votes get treated as such. There will be a window of confusion, but it might not be that big. And there would be an economic incentive for people to establish trusted accounts with high-quality voting behaviour.
  - PoignardAzur 5y ago
    Here's an easy thought experiment: for any propose of the type "what if they had a system that did X?", imagine that someone tells you they'll give you 10 million dollars if you can figure out a way to game that system that can't be detected by Google. If you spend 5 minutes on it, can you think of a way? If you can, congratulations, now imagine millions of other people thought about the same tricks and you get the reason why Google can't ever really win against SEO.
    - eru 5y ago
      Google might not be able to 'win', but they can stay ahead. Eg if they can get to a place where SEO efforts point in the same direction as making your website genuinely more useful to people, then that's good enough for Google.
- wruza 5y ago
  They don't have to make it a public vote. I'm fine to do this work myself for a week or so, and then enjoy crap-free searches. Or link my votes account to someone who I trust and use their opinion. Idk why everyone is praising public anything, because local communities and knowledge webs worked fine pre-internet. Most of the bullshit came with globalization.
  - amelius 5y ago
    I wish there was some standardized way to say "I trust you" on the internet, and share part of their information bubble (e.g. reviews, up/downvoted websites, youtube recommendations, etc.), and this bubble could have some transitive properties (if I trust X and X trusts Y, then to some extent I trust Y too). But it's probably too privacy sensitive (if I see which sites you upvoted, then I have some information about you). Hence, that's probably why this has to be either completely private or completely public.
    - mcv 5y ago
      Well, every social media network tries to capture and monetize this, of course. But yes, it would be nice to have this in a less proprietary way. But I fear it's either going to be a privacy issue (because the person you trust has to publish every page they like and dislike), or it's going to be anonymous and therefore easily gamed by bad actors.
      - amelius 5y ago
        If the group of trusted people in a bubble is large enough (say 1000s of people), then it wouldn't be a problem, I suppose. For example, I wouldn't mind sharing my upvoted websites/videos/products with everyone on HN, as long as it is anonymized. Bad actors can be distrusted by the community, I suppose (though moderation seems to be largely an unsolved problem still).
        eru 5y ago
        Anonymization is actually really, really hard.
- Schroedingersat 5y ago
  Their entire business (advertising) is clustering. They've already done the hard bit. Just cluster people by downvotes and whatever other thousand metrics are already being tracked, and allow them to see results given by other clusters by showing which areas are dense on a PCA or something or saying 'I want my results to only be influenced by people who have downvoted github.org' or whatever.
amelius 5y ago
Yes, Google says they want all our information to "improve our user experience". Except it's not very credible that this is the true reason.
6LLvveMx2koXfwn 5y ago
Isn't Google's monetization for Search results the primary reason for not allowing crowd funded quality metrics? If only good results get to the top how do they make money? Google's Search business model appears to be predicated on poor results getting disproportionately prominent listing.
- mcv 5y ago
  The actual sponsored links end up at the top anyway. I don't see how bad regular results would contribute to their revenue; it would just drive people away.
  - cool_dude85 5y ago
    >I don't see how bad regular results would contribute to their revenue Let's say you run a good song-lyrics site that has the correct lyrics for everyone's favorite songs. You happen to be on page 2 of google results for common queries; all of page 1 is taken up by spammers, fake pages, etc. How can you possibly drive traffic to your site? Maybe you can invest in SEO but no promises there. You'd be competing against people whose whole focus is SEO and nothing else. The only option left is to buy ads.
    - mcv 5y ago
      Yeah, but so can the spammers and fake pages. And it all works together to make Google worse. I agree that it would work as long as Google has an absolute monopoly on search. Google wouldn't care how bad their search results are, because there's nowhere else to go. But if there are alternatives, users should stop using Google and use the alternatives instead, and then Google has an incentive to improve their search results for users again.
  - 6LLvveMx2koXfwn 5y ago
    Let's say we have three search results, good, average and bad, displayed on one result per page in that order. The user is happy, Google is unhappy as there is no motivation for the site owner of the best search result to pay Google for their listing. The only way Google gets money is if it enables the result order to be modified, i.e. the owners of the average or poor sites to disproportionately effect their listing prominence by appearing on page 1. Google do this by allowing paid adverts. Bad or average search results thus get disproportionately high prominence in the listing with the knock on effect that the owner of the best search result now has motivation to pay Google to regain their primary listing. And even further, if the site owner of the best search results now has to pay Google for the prominence of their listing why waste money on continuing to provide the best results? The user is unhappy, Google is happy.
junon 5y ago
It's a huge vector for abuse. The signal:noise ratio wouldn't improve at all.
- acdha 5y ago
  The signal:noise ratio would certainly improve for anyone voting even if they didn’t use it to adjust other people’s search results. I’m also skeptical that all of Google’s enormous investment in ML and staffing is completely powerless to identify bad actors with atypical usage patterns. What seems far more plausible is that they’ve decided it isn’t costing them more in ad sales than it brings in. There are individual domains which would improve results by being blocked but they also pay for search ads so … unsolved grand challenge of computer science it is!
  - lacksconfidence 5y ago
    > I’m also skeptical that all of Google’s enormous investment in ML and staffing is completely powerless to identify bad actors with atypical usage patterns. Isn't that exactly what people are complaining about here though? At least part o the problem with search results is that google seems powerless to recognize and remove useless bad actors (stack overflow copies, etc.) from their index.
    - acdha 5y ago
      My position is that they could do far more if they cared - simply blocking spam domains like it’s the previous century would make my experience better – but that they have made a business decision not to devote more resources to the problem.
- Schroedingersat 5y ago
  If I can block the 5 word soup gpt2 fake support sites that make up the top 20 results for obscure debugging messages from my own personal account, then my signal to noise ratio went from 0 to some number above 0. This is an infinite improvement for the first page. Noone ever wants to go to xypdf.com for any reason unless they want to feel like they just had a stroke, how is (was? it made me stop using google except as a last resort in 2019) it often 3 of the top 5 results? I wish I could just invert their SEO quality metric (there was a golden window around 2018 where you could just type -best into search engines that still respected subtraction to get only good reviews but sadly quality sites have fallen into line with the duck speak). I feel it's a pretty reliable indicator of garbage.
aqme28 5y ago
But you do vote on search results. Google knows if you stay on a page or leave it quickly for another result. That's an implicit vote that they definitely take into account. Having that explicit button might not really add any additional value.
- mcv 5y ago
  How? I don't use Chrome.
  - tommek4077 5y ago
    Browserfingerprinting, they see you again on ther resultspage after x seconds -> bad result. They don't see you again -> good result.
    - mcv 5y ago
      That's not how I use the results page, though. I open the top x number of results in separate tabs, and then check those pages. I only go back to the tab with the results page after I've checked them all, so that might be a while, even if they all suck. So if they look at my behaviour the way you say, then the feedback they'd get from me would be that the top x-1 results are always bad, while the xth result is always good. That sounds like a poor algorithm for them, but it might explain why my Google results always suck.
      - lacksconfidence 5y ago
        Luckily for search, it is how the vast majority of users use things. Less than 1% of users doing things differently makes the stats a little messier, but still works quite well.
      - aqme28 5y ago
        Thanks to things like Google Analytics, Google knows what site you're viewing at any moment in time. It can see you go through the results sequentially and stop at some point.

by mcv 5y ago

djohnston 5y ago

It would be abused into the ground by the same people who set up these scam sites in the first place. For most things on the internet, the crappiness of the average person is the limiting factor.

amelius 5y ago
Wouldn't that provide more data on who are the scammers?
- djohnston 5y ago
  Not really. In these areas there's a general principle that the moment you start using a signal to enforce on bad actors that signal's value decays. It's sad, I actually think web3 could help curb abuse at scale by making it too expensive to scale horizontally. Imagine paying a "stamp" to send an email on the blockchain, spam email would dramatically drop. Maybe similar mechanics could be in play for other things but then you lose democratization of information.
  - kgonza 5y ago
    What is web3? What exactly is it? And how could it be used in this case?
    - djohnston 5y ago
      The idea is you'd have an email client but all data is stored encrypted on chain and you'd have to pay tx costs to send things. By having this sort of stamp tax spammer wouldn't be able to scale mass messaging as it would bankrupt them.
      - jspiral 5y ago
        in meatspace though, my real mailbox is mostly filled with spam that the sender paid to have delivered. granted, it would at least act as a limiting factor.
        Schroedingersat 5y ago
        If you have an auditable tx history, then mixers/exchanges/wallets etc can be marked as sources of the money used by spammers
machiaweliczny 5y ago
What if they took only votes from people that pay and have account for X time? Also what’s the problem with adding revert per user? With some events architekture it should be trivial. They could even train AI on this data to automatically sugest suspects.
- mcv 5y ago
  It's totally fine if they only use my own votes to modify my results. In fact, if we're going to do that, I'd really like to block some sites from my search results entirely. Though ideally, I would also like to include the votes from people I trust.
- lbriner 5y ago
  People sell good accounts for lots of money to the spammers.
  - mcv 5y ago
    And when those accounts suddenly start behaving like bad accounts, their votes get treated as such. There will be a window of confusion, but it might not be that big. And there would be an economic incentive for people to establish trusted accounts with high-quality voting behaviour.
- PoignardAzur 5y ago
  Here's an easy thought experiment: for any propose of the type "what if they had a system that did X?", imagine that someone tells you they'll give you 10 million dollars if you can figure out a way to game that system that can't be detected by Google. If you spend 5 minutes on it, can you think of a way? If you can, congratulations, now imagine millions of other people thought about the same tricks and you get the reason why Google can't ever really win against SEO.
  - eru 5y ago
    Google might not be able to 'win', but they can stay ahead. Eg if they can get to a place where SEO efforts point in the same direction as making your website genuinely more useful to people, then that's good enough for Google.
wruza 5y ago
They don't have to make it a public vote. I'm fine to do this work myself for a week or so, and then enjoy crap-free searches. Or link my votes account to someone who I trust and use their opinion. Idk why everyone is praising public anything, because local communities and knowledge webs worked fine pre-internet. Most of the bullshit came with globalization.
- amelius 5y ago
  I wish there was some standardized way to say "I trust you" on the internet, and share part of their information bubble (e.g. reviews, up/downvoted websites, youtube recommendations, etc.), and this bubble could have some transitive properties (if I trust X and X trusts Y, then to some extent I trust Y too). But it's probably too privacy sensitive (if I see which sites you upvoted, then I have some information about you). Hence, that's probably why this has to be either completely private or completely public.
  - mcv 5y ago
    Well, every social media network tries to capture and monetize this, of course. But yes, it would be nice to have this in a less proprietary way. But I fear it's either going to be a privacy issue (because the person you trust has to publish every page they like and dislike), or it's going to be anonymous and therefore easily gamed by bad actors.
    - amelius 5y ago
      If the group of trusted people in a bubble is large enough (say 1000s of people), then it wouldn't be a problem, I suppose. For example, I wouldn't mind sharing my upvoted websites/videos/products with everyone on HN, as long as it is anonymized. Bad actors can be distrusted by the community, I suppose (though moderation seems to be largely an unsolved problem still).
      - eru 5y ago
        Anonymization is actually really, really hard.
Schroedingersat 5y ago
Their entire business (advertising) is clustering. They've already done the hard bit. Just cluster people by downvotes and whatever other thousand metrics are already being tracked, and allow them to see results given by other clusters by showing which areas are dense on a PCA or something or saying 'I want my results to only be influenced by people who have downvoted github.org' or whatever.

amelius 5y ago

Yes, Google says they want all our information to "improve our user experience". Except it's not very credible that this is the true reason.

6LLvveMx2koXfwn 5y ago

Isn't Google's monetization for Search results the primary reason for not allowing crowd funded quality metrics? If only good results get to the top how do they make money? Google's Search business model appears to be predicated on poor results getting disproportionately prominent listing.

mcv 5y ago
The actual sponsored links end up at the top anyway. I don't see how bad regular results would contribute to their revenue; it would just drive people away.
- cool_dude85 5y ago
  >I don't see how bad regular results would contribute to their revenue Let's say you run a good song-lyrics site that has the correct lyrics for everyone's favorite songs. You happen to be on page 2 of google results for common queries; all of page 1 is taken up by spammers, fake pages, etc. How can you possibly drive traffic to your site? Maybe you can invest in SEO but no promises there. You'd be competing against people whose whole focus is SEO and nothing else. The only option left is to buy ads.
  - mcv 5y ago
    Yeah, but so can the spammers and fake pages. And it all works together to make Google worse. I agree that it would work as long as Google has an absolute monopoly on search. Google wouldn't care how bad their search results are, because there's nowhere else to go. But if there are alternatives, users should stop using Google and use the alternatives instead, and then Google has an incentive to improve their search results for users again.
- 6LLvveMx2koXfwn 5y ago
  Let's say we have three search results, good, average and bad, displayed on one result per page in that order. The user is happy, Google is unhappy as there is no motivation for the site owner of the best search result to pay Google for their listing. The only way Google gets money is if it enables the result order to be modified, i.e. the owners of the average or poor sites to disproportionately effect their listing prominence by appearing on page 1. Google do this by allowing paid adverts. Bad or average search results thus get disproportionately high prominence in the listing with the knock on effect that the owner of the best search result now has motivation to pay Google to regain their primary listing. And even further, if the site owner of the best search results now has to pay Google for the prominence of their listing why waste money on continuing to provide the best results? The user is unhappy, Google is happy.

junon 5y ago

It's a huge vector for abuse. The signal:noise ratio wouldn't improve at all.

acdha 5y ago
The signal:noise ratio would certainly improve for anyone voting even if they didn’t use it to adjust other people’s search results. I’m also skeptical that all of Google’s enormous investment in ML and staffing is completely powerless to identify bad actors with atypical usage patterns. What seems far more plausible is that they’ve decided it isn’t costing them more in ad sales than it brings in. There are individual domains which would improve results by being blocked but they also pay for search ads so … unsolved grand challenge of computer science it is!
- lacksconfidence 5y ago
  > I’m also skeptical that all of Google’s enormous investment in ML and staffing is completely powerless to identify bad actors with atypical usage patterns. Isn't that exactly what people are complaining about here though? At least part o the problem with search results is that google seems powerless to recognize and remove useless bad actors (stack overflow copies, etc.) from their index.
  - acdha 5y ago
    My position is that they could do far more if they cared - simply blocking spam domains like it’s the previous century would make my experience better – but that they have made a business decision not to devote more resources to the problem.
Schroedingersat 5y ago
If I can block the 5 word soup gpt2 fake support sites that make up the top 20 results for obscure debugging messages from my own personal account, then my signal to noise ratio went from 0 to some number above 0. This is an infinite improvement for the first page. Noone ever wants to go to xypdf.com for any reason unless they want to feel like they just had a stroke, how is (was? it made me stop using google except as a last resort in 2019) it often 3 of the top 5 results? I wish I could just invert their SEO quality metric (there was a golden window around 2018 where you could just type -best into search engines that still respected subtraction to get only good reviews but sadly quality sites have fallen into line with the duck speak). I feel it's a pretty reliable indicator of garbage.

aqme28 5y ago

But you do vote on search results. Google knows if you stay on a page or leave it quickly for another result. That's an implicit vote that they definitely take into account. Having that explicit button might not really add any additional value.

mcv 5y ago
How? I don't use Chrome.
- tommek4077 5y ago
  Browserfingerprinting, they see you again on ther resultspage after x seconds -> bad result. They don't see you again -> good result.
  - mcv 5y ago
    That's not how I use the results page, though. I open the top x number of results in separate tabs, and then check those pages. I only go back to the tab with the results page after I've checked them all, so that might be a while, even if they all suck. So if they look at my behaviour the way you say, then the feedback they'd get from me would be that the top x-1 results are always bad, while the xth result is always good. That sounds like a poor algorithm for them, but it might explain why my Google results always suck.
    - lacksconfidence 5y ago
      Luckily for search, it is how the vast majority of users use things. Less than 1% of users doing things differently makes the stats a little messier, but still works quite well.
    - aqme28 5y ago
      Thanks to things like Google Analytics, Google knows what site you're viewing at any moment in time. It can see you go through the results sequentially and stop at some point.