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Comment by SimonPStevens | Hacker News Reader

No, it's not particular hard, but it will make the problem worse.

Why?

99% of users are non-tech oriented.

Those users will not really be aware of the specific problems with the search results, they won't understand the concept of a good vs bad result and they certainly won't bother to tweak/ban/filter their results.

The 1% that do care and are currently being vocal about it will start filtering their results and they will perceive that the problem is solved. They will stop making a fuss.

So now, the complaints have gone away, but 99% of users are still using the broken system, so the good sites that create good original content are still ranking below the scrapers and spam results for 99% of the users.

The problem must be solved for all (or at least the majority) of users.

(And you can't take the 1%s filtering and apply it to all users in some kind of social search because the spammers will just join the 1% and game the system)

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The problem must be solved for all (or at least the majority) of users.

Perfection being the enemy of good enough, and a common and valued and traditional mechanism to delay product shipment.

And Google might well be able to utilize information from that 1% of users that have sorted that out - 1% of a Really Big Number of searches, factoring for the folks looking to game the search results (downward, in this case) - to provide feedback back into their search results.

This goes back to the traditional engineering parable: is it better to create a million dollar car that gets 900mpg (gasoline), or to make a 5 dollar widget that adds another 5mpg in every car?

>99% of users are non-tech oriented.

I disagree. Let's call it 95%.

>Those users will not really be aware of the specific problems with the search results, they won't understand the concept of a good vs bad result and they certainly won't bother to tweak/ban/filter their results.

So have only people that have enabled the advanced features of Google search ban sites. All of a sudden only people that "get it" are the ones that can ban.

>So now, the complaints have gone away, but 99% of users are still using the broken system, so the good sites that create good original content are still ranking below the scrapers and spam results for 99% of the users.

So we need to use the votes to stop the spammers.

>(And you can't take the 1%s filtering and apply it to all users in some kind of social search because the spammers will just join the 1% and game the system)

Sure you can. If you couldn't then Reddit would be a wasteland of adds, but it isn't. They only have 4 or 5 engineers there and they can write code that will stop vote rings, let alone Google.

It's actually a pretty simple exercise to stop vote rings, unless the anti-vote ring code is open sourced, but even there it should be possible.

Do you think 99% of users are too stupid to click 'report spam' when they get a spam email?

Not "too stupid" no.

I think 99% of email users have not been adequately trained in why or how they should report spam, and even if they were I think most of them would still not care enough to actually do it with any regularity.

When pushed many may acknowledge that they know it exists, they will probably even be able to find the button when asked if given a chance. But they won't remember to do it when they see spam, they'll just ignore it and move on to the messages from people they know.

Do you think this could be improved by alternate wording? Instead of reporting 'spam', ask the user 'was this useful?' or 'did you want this?'.

After all, the real goal is giving people a better, more relevant experience, detecting and removing spam is just one facet of that. Whether it's email or search.

In general yes, I think improved UI can guide user behaviour to more desirable outcomes.

However I don't think it's as simple as changing the button text. Even a process driven UI, like a wizard style interface where you have to click next to progress through each step might work, but users very quickly become immune to dialogs. They don't read them, they just evolve the actions that get them to their goal the fastest, and the users goal does not include reporting their spam.

Maybe something more automatic : a user makes a search, clicks on a link, if it is spam, he'll probably hit the back button within a couple of seconds. The average time spent by a user on a result before going back to Google could be used a as metric of quality.

I'd be very surprised if Google does not already implement this in some form.

I don't think changing the wording will solve the problem entirely. On the rare occasion that my wife receives spam via gmail she'll simply archive it. The action to hide an email you never did or no longer do care about is so common and so easily accessed by a well-learned key cut that it doesn't occur to her to do otherwise until after the fact; she is well aware that marking spam improve spam filtering, of course.

I just told my wife: think of that button as being "Report Abuse".

She's been applying it ever since quite efficiently.

Oh, for sure. My wife knows what the button _does_ down into the very statistical application of it. I think in her case the issue is a UX problem: it is much easier to archive than it is to report spam. Gmail also makes it far more common to archive, as well.

Shift+e for "report spam" would be perfect. Same key, just a bit chorded.

People would always be trying to game such a system. If you worked at company A, and search for keyword shared with company B, lots of people would be tempted to down vote company B in results

Not all spam is so obvious, both in email and search results. These are all assumptions, but I think it's safe to say the average person identifies the email 'Grow your Pe Nis like a Woman' (true story) as spam. However, the less obvious 'Enter to win a trip to Hawaii' still fools many people. Think about how effective the 'I am a Nigerian Prince that needs help out of my country and then I will give you 1.2 million dollars' scam has been over the years.

With search results, the spam is more often than not Made for AdSense sites that the average user doesn't realize are pure garbage. Then there are the mass-produced content sites like eHow that most technical people realize are worthless, but the average user loves. It isn't often you see Viagra sites popping up in searches for woodworking. It does happen occasionally though.

So no, I am pretty confident a majority of users would not utilize effectively a feature like that.

Frankly, I'm not fussed whether the majority of users would use it right.

I posted this as an entirely self-serving request for a way to make my results cleaner.

Also: If the majority of users do like eHow, then that's a sign it's not spam. But a lot of 'power users' consider it spam. This is an argument FOR personalised blacklists, not against them.

That's the point. It might make your results clearer, but it doesn't solve the problem for good original content producers which is the real issue here, not the individual.

Exactly. The point is that users who consider eHow useful, don't filter it, and users who do, do. Let the user decide instead of doing it for them.

You report spam when you know it's spam.

And when it's about search result. People are browsing and clicking through adsense filled "landing page sites". Most of them think that it's their fault that they couldn't find the thing they were searching for.

I think you are ignoring a very obvious fact, those 1% that are no longer 'complaining' are really doing so in an automated fashion with their blacklists. Further I think the complaints will be even better because people are more inclined to a fix a problem if it is easy to do so (adding it to their blacklist) than sending an email saying please remove this from my search results (and hoping it gets removed in the future), or doing an ad-hoc in browser solution that does not give feed back to google.

What I think really needs to be exploited is a ring of trust type aspect, I'd like to have the Hackernews ring where all us on here work together to remove the spam from our results and let's Google see what are taking out, maybe that will help them improve their algorithms.

Google already has reading level data per domain (append &tbs=rl:1 to any site search)

Why not apply that reading level algorithm to users gmail data and public social network profiles, estimate the users IQ, and then those at the top of the pile are given "result burrying" moderator privileges.

Confirmed user accounts (cell phone verification) combined with other algorithms, such as profile age and activity, could make spamming sufficiently complex to de-incenvize all but the most illicit spammers.

Users at the bottom of the IQ pile (non-logged in users based on past search data and geo-location socio-economic status) don't even get the option to bury results. Which, by the way I think is more like 20% of US internet users than 99%.

That's not true. Google is already having a Spam button in Gmail. The same idea can be applied here.

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