Some comments I had on this a little while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20282606
> I want my search results to prefer [.....] other pages marked high for quality by people who [some algorithm] to this page.
Facebook/YouTube already do this and it is a disaster, which maybe even has indirectly contributed to rise of antivaxx, Q, Trump election, Capitol attack etc.
Before personalized recommendation systems, when an antivaxxer made a video, hardly anyone saw it, when they liked it, the like resulted in nothing.
When their likes started affecting their personal search results, liking one antivaxx video made search produce hundreds more of them. It finds so much of the same stuff they no longer have free time to check an opposing opinion.
You're operating under an assumption that your judgement is more correct or better for you, and the entire problem is about finding gems in an ocean of trash. The reality is more complicated, for you antivaxx content is trash, for them it is your content that is trash.
Like if I think Wikipedia is a better resource than crunch base, then let me make that decision. I don’t care how good their SEO is.
And in any case, I don't care. I know what I feel is good content and it's stuff like this, and I want more of it, and less blogspam.
So yes, my assumption is that my judgement is more correct for me - because it is.
That is plain arrogant. Not only you refuse to remember that you may be wrong, you also want search engines to protect you from ever discovering that.
What if your neighbor likes something that will eventually hurt you. For example, burning the nearby 5G tower that serves your phone, because they like the theory that will improve everyone's health around. Is their judgement correct for them? Do you want them to get more of stuff they like? Should their community of single-minded people be assisted by search engines in avoiding (what they think is) spam?
I understand everybody wants less SEO spam, I simply point that the solution you're thinking about has already been tried and found to have consequences no one expected. "Give me more stuff that I like" is the old problem. The new problem is called "How to find more stuff that I like without creating an echo chamber".
If my neighbour burns down the cell tower, if another neighbour has trapped themselves in an antivax chamber on Facebook - well, those are some hypotheticals that have literally nothing with my point, which is simply that I want better search results, driven my my own selections.
I do wish there was something next to each search result though that was like "I like this site, include it more often." or "This site is garbage, ignore it forever"
I think it was this thing:
My app only allows me to "like" things and I like some stuff that is low quality because I like to see it in my feed.
(A vague idea I've wanted to implement for awhile now for both search engines, and for HN/reddit like sites... but the amount of effort to do it well would be really high)
But FFS, it's 2021, we deserve some decent search engine results.
I doubt Google would do it unless they absolutely had to, so I hope you or someone else forces their hand and shows them that it's time.
How expensive would it really be?
You have O(the_internet) in pages and metadata, and you have O(world_population) in user preferences. So long as your index structure allows those to be mostly decoupled (if I had to take a first crack at it I'd probably try to embed preferences and pages into a vector space and build a projection index -- exact matches are hard in that system, but decent personalized results are easy), I don't think it'd be all that much more space than a non-personalized search engine, especially given that the world population is kind of small compared to the size of the internet.
For that matter, the web isn't thaaat big (ignoring images and video). The entire common crawl can fit on a single $3k-$5k disk uncompressed.
Select your own trusted reviewers, and unsubscribe from any that start recommending garbage.
I'd like to put a timeout on any blogspam web sites I come across, and not have them show up in my search results again for one year. By that time they might have switched to having decent content, or maybe just gone down the toilet anyway or been pushed down by Google's algorithms. Or if not I could ban hammer them again.