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

by junon 5y ago

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.

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

by junon 5y ago

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

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.