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> That information is technically not spam, but it's on a wrong level, badly presented, etc. I'd count that kind of low quality site as spam, and the problem i
by jsnell 3y ago
> That information is technically not spam, but it's on a wrong level, badly presented, etc.
I'd count that kind of low quality site as spam, and the problem is that there's a basically an infinite supply of them. The boost feature is more interesting in that the curation is at least not a never-ending task. New high quality sites that I know about don't pop up all that often!
It's still not an entirely robust feature since you'll need to do a lot of quality work to prevent mediocre results from a boosted site from shadowing better results from unboosted sites, especially for users with a ton of boosts. But that quality work is much easier to justify when the manual curation is one of your core selling points and used by a large proportion of the customers vs. when it's a feature in a dusty context menu that basically none of the userbase interacts with.
> Maybe 90% of users would ignore this feature. But the 10% of power users maybe disproportionately important
I'd be shocked if the number of users for this kind of feature was anywhere near 10% of all search engine users. Something like 0.1% seems much more likely. But again, if those 0.1% really want that feature it's a great fit for a power user search engine.
It still doesn't mean that it's a feature every search engine should obviously have.
- catach 3y ago> you'll need to do a lot of quality work to prevent mediocre results from a boosted site from shadowing better results from unboosted sites That strikes me as a non-goal. As the search engine, you can't know what attributes a user is valuing when they boost, and so you can't know when it's appropriate to override that boost. "Better" is subjective, contextual, and comes in thousands of different flavors.
- viraptor 3y ago> New high quality sites that I know about don't pop up all that often! But when they do, how are you going to know if all you see is the mediocre spam instead? No, I want to block the domains which are never going to be a good result. This may actually surface things I will want to boost.
- dcow 3y agoPintrest is among the top blocked. It clearly doesn't have spam, but it commonly shows up because of it’s vast array of user content. For people not interested in Pinterest content, this is a very useful feature. NYTimes is another good example, great content for subscribers, essentially useless spam in a search result for non-subscribers. The only person who can configure this is the user.
- IG_Semmelweiss 3y agoCan you shine light as to why w3schools.com is blocked and lowered so much, while most other sources of CS information are raised ? Is their information of such low quality ?
- LordShredda 3y agoThey used to have outright incorrect information a long time ago. They fixed the site and are much better, but it's aimed at a non technical audience in the end.
- dcow 3y agohttps://www.w3fools.com/ https://www.w3fools.com/ They’re better now but this is timeless.