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Comment by AndrewO | Hacker News Reader

I see a lot of people asking what happens when a group of people downvote a site just to ruin its ranking. Sure that's a problem, but there's an easy solution on Google's end: your blacklist only affects you. Yes, that means all of us have to hide efreedom ourselves. Doesn't seem like a problem to me...

Plus, we are talking about a company whose core business demands that it can identify groups of bad-faith voters. Given time, they may find a way to incorporate this data safely into the ranking data (if anyone could, it would be Google).

And I know there are extensions to do this (mine mysteriously stopped working recently), but doing this on the client-side in a way that's bound to a single browser install just seems wrong to me, especially for Google.

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I think a personal black-list would be ideal initially as those most motivated would be most helped, i.e. the majority of people who might not care about the status quo are then not impacted at all.

As mentioned above, then introducing the shared-ranking via the social graph would be the next logical step. It could be something opt-in'd to ease adoption.

Then, ideally (and this is my personal 'white whale' problem) it would be great to imagine something where the user could whitelist through no action of their own rather than have to do any work to block, i.e. use the result set 'hit' of what's clicked in the results to act as a personal ranking upvote.

There's some interesting engineering issues of per-user indexing though, but hey, you wanted to work at Google right?

"Yes, that means all of us have to hide efreedom ourselves. Doesn't seem like a problem to me..."

efreedom is monetised by Google ads. Might seem like a problem to Google.

Let's say it starts with personal blacklists. Then trusted lists that you can subscribe to (AdBlock-style). Then word spreads and enough people are using it such that AdSense revenue drops 20-30% or more?

(IME, CTR on ads is much higher on these content-light sites than it is on more reputable sites.)

To be honest, I think this is the reason Google doesn't have this feature. The sites everyone wants to blacklist are the spammers that game Google search and show Google ads. If they don't get traffic, they don't show ads. If they don't show ads, Google doesn't get that money either.

It's to Google's benefit that people end up on these pages, see a ton of ads, and then click on one out of confusion or desperation.

Yes, but that would be pretty evil of them, don't you think? ;)

That's strange, though, because it should be clear to them that the long term effect of this is pretty dangerous for them - if their search results were always the best, then they would be largely unassailable in the search market, but as it is, they're decreasing satisfaction with their product. It's hard to improve everyone's perception of your product once that's happened, and it opens them up to usurpers.

It does, but Microsoft's thrown loads of money at the problem and not made huge inroads so maybe they figure it's worth the risk?

The blacklist does not only have to affect me, just throw in the blacklists of my social graph too. These are the people I trust.

I don't know about you, but my social graph is pretty diverse. I wouldn't trust all those very different people to make an important decision like "what sites should be visible to me in search engines."

You're right. Others should not be able to hide sites from my search results, but their decision on blacklisting sites can affect the ranking of sites in my search results.

Nobody said you had to trust everyone in your social graph. I definitely wouldn't, but that doesn't mean there aren't a few select people that I would trust.

Which brings up another point: I think that if anything is going to threaten Google in the coming years, it'll be the quality of their social graph. Gmail gives them a lot of data, but if my inbox is any indication a lot of it is somewhat ambiguous. Aside from that their social apps haven't done too well (in most places).

Facebook, on the other hand, has developed a system where nearly every user activity creates a new easily processed and meaningful connection between users or out to the web itself. And those connections are probably closer to representations of some kind of trust than "I email that person a lot".

Anyway, I'm not saying the sky is falling for Google, just that search appears to be changing for the first time in awhile.

This is exactly what I meant. Lots of people have added the idea about crowd-sourced re-ranking based on blacklisting, then said "it'll never work..."

It seems to be a particular affliction among our group (by that I mean anyone who spends a lot of time here) that once we learn to apply one revolutionary/disruptive idea, we can't stop even when we probably should. I'd say it's because we're used to trying to think of how to scale-up every idea, but I've been accused of armchair-psychology before... :)

We can also look to the AdBlock extension. They have prefilled lists that you can customize, so it's a "shared ecosystem" that you subscribe to, then customize yourself.

I think this could be modeled after Gmail's social spam filter.

It should be pretty easy to set up public block lists. The ones that are honest about their methodology (of which sites are spammy) would win.

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