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Comment by daten | Hacker News Reader

But if we demoted web pages that have negative comments against them, you might not be able to find information about many elected officials, not to mention a lot of important but controversial concepts. So far we have not found an effective way to significantly improve search using sentiment analysis. Of course, we will continue trying.

Google admits, and I agree, that this is a bad idea. But then why are they continuing to attempt it? Wouldn't neutral search results be better than those that favored a subjectively positive or negative business?

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There might be interesting ways to combine sentiment analysis with other factors.

For example, off the top of my head, combine it with the selectivity of the search word. If the sentiment is positive about a store, then it may be a good search result for a word like "sunglasses" which is associated with many sites. If the sentiment is mostly negative, then it may still rank very highly for keywords/phrases that are highly selective e.g. "decor eyes" while dropping precipitously for the less selective keywords. I.e.: positive sentiment opens up the umbrella, irrespective of how high the umbrella goes.

This is an excellent point and deserves more votes.

Google does have somewhat "sneekier" options: - Demote negatively reviewed items only on searches which seem "inherently commercial" - ie, act differently depending on whether the search is for a store or an opinion. - Have some sort of "realness" index: is this entity actually selling sunglasses.

These aren't necessarily easy so your question stands.

Maybe they are continuing to research it because enough people outside Google think it's a good idea that not researching it would make them appear unresponsive or irresponsible? Kind of like politicians doing something for the sake of being seen doing something.

I agree. Seems to me to be a knee-jerk reaction by Google - bending to negative mainstream press. I bet this decision came from marketing rather than engineering ;)

And how would you go about ranking them then? alphabetically?

More research and trial/error never hurts.

Research may not hurt. Trial and error does if the error affects the users.

If something bad is happening in the world, like thousands of people being murdered in some remote country, and every page that links to articles about it has a negative tone because they're condemning what's happening, should google hide those articles?

I would be fine with alphabetical results if they would give me a regular expression search instead of recommended results.

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