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Dumb question - why can't I just upvote and downvote pages, and Google enhances its ranking for me based on that? Maybe that's why the search "X reddit" is so
by civilized 5y ago
Dumb question - why can't I just upvote and downvote pages, and Google enhances its ranking for me based on that?
Maybe that's why the search "X reddit" is so popular - it's got a bit of that social validation.
- arthurcolle 5y agothis used to exist but they got rid of it like 10 yrs ago IIRC
- lordnacho 5y agoWho do you reckon would cast the most votes? Correct, SEO bots.
- jancsika 5y agoIf Google can't use it's vast array of user data to tell the difference between SEO bots and non-bot users, what's even the point of it collecting all that fucking data in the first place?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bryanrasmussen 5y agoGood point, but I have my reasons for suspecting they can't tell the difference https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31296953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31296953
- scoopertrooper 5y agoMaybe that's part of how they train it?
- rednalexa 5y agoI would assume that if Google is paying 10$/hour for humans to rank content, someone else is paying 11$/hour to fool it with a human generating content, clicks, etc. Additionally, people writing bots learn just like Google learns, and start generating what appears to be legitimate interactions. Same algorithms that fit to critique between 'bot' and 'non-bot' class can be used to create bots that fall into the 'non-bot' category. It's a losing battle - but what we get is better than we would get if they collected less data.
- bhartzer 5y agoThat’s what’s confusing in the articles that have come out about quality raters. Quality Raters don’t actually rank websites. Quality Raters look at websites and answer questions about them. Google then uses that data as a small part of their algorithm to adjust some factors about those sites. Quality Raters don’t actually rank pages on google.
- anm89 5y agoThis isn't correct. I was a quality rater. We spent almost all of our time literally ranking websites.
- yupper32 5y agoYour ranking is a signal that goes into the algorithm, not the actual end result.
- anm89 5y agoI understand that. My post never implies that that was the case. > Quality Raters look at websites and answer questions about them. Wrong. I was never asked any questions beyond to rank to site quality for a query > Quality Raters don’t actually rank website Wrong again. This is what we did. We assessed website rankings for specific queries.
- 4y ago
- civilized 5y agoCollaborative filtering: not just for movie recommendations anymore?
- q-big 5y agocivilized wrote about enhancing the ranking for the person who casts the vote. Using these votes to do changes in the Google ranking for the general public can of course easily be abused.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 5y agoGoogle already has similar signals: 1. Do you click on the link in the results page? 2. After clicking on that link, do you go back to the search or not? 3. How long do you stay there before coming back? Adding an explicit up/downvote would capture some additional information, but it would overlap with the above, and most users would ignore the button. I’d guess Google has at some point experimented with this and found it wasn’t worth keeping.
- bhartzer 5y agoWe know they probably use CTR as a ranking factor. However, a site could just literally add JS code on the page and disable the back button. So I don’t think that would work out that well for Google.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 5y agoThat sounds like a trick that would only work until Google noticed.
- Nextgrid 5y agoSince a few years there’s been plenty of cheap tricks that would’ve earned you a manual ban/downrank back in the day that Google now turns a blind eye to.
- civilized 5y agoI'm sure they have all sorts of fancy stuff but at the end of the day, there's a lot of SEO garbage at the top of the rankings that I would really love to downvote.
- hypothesis 5y agoThat’s assuming that the goal is to make search better and not say make more money.
- 5y ago
- bhartzer 5y agoGoogle actually tried that a few years SEO through a google chrome add-on. I heard it didn’t work very well for them. The results weren’t very good or helpful.
- CephalopodMD 5y agoGoogle used to do this, but they rolled it back because the hard honest truth is most people don't like taking surveys. Behavior is a better and more available signal.
- Nextgrid 5y agoHow are you supposed to “engage” with Google search once you’ve downvoted all the spammy ad-ridden garbage and actually get useful results on the first non-ad link?