These sites should be heavily penalised for click-baiting and they have been doing it for years.
For their commercial search results I'll grant you that there's an incentive. But for their non-commercial search results why would they care? That's how it used to work, you couldn't delete a domain from the paid results, but you could make it disappear from the unpaid ones.
"GHHbD" is a precursor to uBlacklist; and was for many years THE replacement to blocking sites on Google Search after Google removed the built-in function.
It also has a 'Block' button next to the search results (remember, the script existed long before uBlacklist), which allows to grey-out or hide results, based on subdomains down to the base domain.
The disadvantage of GHHbD is that it doesn't handled regex filtering. However one of its many advantages is that it does block TLDs: https://greasyfork.org/en/forum/discussion/comment/55821/#Co...
Don't forget to use ungoogled chromium if possible
The only downside is you will have to load unpacked extensions instead of using the Chrome "store" and you will have to manually install Chromium updates from the same site:
Eg there are performance and memory differences between the two browsers, and different extensions are available.
That sounds like a bad idea for something like a browser that should get security updates as fast as possible.
Google did copy the voting feature on their results page briefly but abandoned it. [0] This was back in 2006-7. We learned the hard way that it's pretty much impossible to compete with Google in search even when you're innovating. They either copy you, or can just blackhole you out of existence.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2007/11/28/straight-out-of-left-field...
This is a risky assumption. I tend to click all the links first, and only then check if they're the results I'm looking for.
that can be detected, by checking further searches are made using the same session.
>Or trying a different search engine.
Maybe if your audience is mainly HN users it might cause an issue, but I think most people don't bother with that so you can count it as noise.
Idk why everyone is praising public anything, because local communities and knowledge webs worked fine pre-internet. Most of the bullshit came with globalization.
But it's probably too privacy sensitive (if I see which sites you upvoted, then I have some information about you). Hence, that's probably why this has to be either completely private or completely public.
But yes, it would be nice to have this in a less proprietary way. But I fear it's either going to be a privacy issue (because the person you trust has to publish every page they like and dislike), or it's going to be anonymous and therefore easily gamed by bad actors.
For example, I wouldn't mind sharing my upvoted websites/videos/products with everyone on HN, as long as it is anonymized. Bad actors can be distrusted by the community, I suppose (though moderation seems to be largely an unsolved problem still).
Click/dismiss "make it private/public" bubble.
Set default vote visibility in settings.
Enable/disable the bubble.
List/add/remove sites in a privacy list.
But the common notion is that it's probably too hard for "regular" users, so we have the internet of nonsense instead. Few more years and we won't find anything good.
If you spend 5 minutes on it, can you think of a way? If you can, congratulations, now imagine millions of other people thought about the same tricks and you get the reason why Google can't ever really win against SEO.
Eg if they can get to a place where SEO efforts point in the same direction as making your website genuinely more useful to people, then that's good enough for Google.
Just cluster people by downvotes and whatever other thousand metrics are already being tracked, and allow them to see results given by other clusters by showing which areas are dense on a PCA or something or saying 'I want my results to only be influenced by people who have downvoted github.org' or whatever.
Let's say you run a good song-lyrics site that has the correct lyrics for everyone's favorite songs. You happen to be on page 2 of google results for common queries; all of page 1 is taken up by spammers, fake pages, etc.
How can you possibly drive traffic to your site? Maybe you can invest in SEO but no promises there. You'd be competing against people whose whole focus is SEO and nothing else. The only option left is to buy ads.
And it all works together to make Google worse.
I agree that it would work as long as Google has an absolute monopoly on search. Google wouldn't care how bad their search results are, because there's nowhere else to go. But if there are alternatives, users should stop using Google and use the alternatives instead, and then Google has an incentive to improve their search results for users again.
Having that explicit button might not really add any additional value.
Especially for use cases like reviews where you are looking for multiple opinions.
The hard to navigate site full of waffle, and SEO duckspeak nonsense gets a positive while the site with clear concise information the user can absorb in 2s gets penalized.
So if they look at my behaviour the way you say, then the feedback they'd get from me would be that the top x-1 results are always bad, while the xth result is always good. That sounds like a poor algorithm for them, but it might explain why my Google results always suck.
Noone ever wants to go to xypdf.com for any reason unless they want to feel like they just had a stroke, how is (was? it made me stop using google except as a last resort in 2019) it often 3 of the top 5 results?
I wish I could just invert their SEO quality metric (there was a golden window around 2018 where you could just type -best into search engines that still respected subtraction to get only good reviews but sadly quality sites have fallen into line with the duck speak). I feel it's a pretty reliable indicator of garbage.
I’m also skeptical that all of Google’s enormous investment in ML and staffing is completely powerless to identify bad actors with atypical usage patterns. What seems far more plausible is that they’ve decided it isn’t costing them more in ad sales than it brings in. There are individual domains which would improve results by being blocked but they also pay for search ads so … unsolved grand challenge of computer science it is!
Isn't that exactly what people are complaining about here though? At least part o the problem with search results is that google seems powerless to recognize and remove useless bad actors (stack overflow copies, etc.) from their index.
If SEO works and a result appears closer to result #1 in the SERPs, then the "true", non SEO-assisted result it is displacing would appear further from result #1. Apply this across the board and what we have are many, many non-SEO results that are pushed down in Google's ranking. No one is "penalising" these pages, however they suffer visibility problems because they have not engaegd in SEO. The incentives created by Google's secretive ranking system and online advertising commercial focus are perverse or at least in conflict with the user's goals. Google discourages and even prevents any user from looking at results that were hits but were not ranked high. Pages that may not succombed to the the influence of such incentives may "disappear".
What if a user understands this and wants ignore the Google ranking system. What if the user wants to see the true, non-SEO results. Google actively limits the user's ability to see those displaced results. For example if a user searches for a common term, such as "example", she will not be able to view more than 200-300 results. Elsewhere in this thread someone also noted even with a paid API, Google limits users to 1000 results. If the user wants to the see the full range of pages that have hits for the word "example", she cannot do so. If the user would like to perform a single search for all pages containing the term "example" and then sort by some other objective criteria such as alphabetical by domainname, date, page size, etc., she cannot do so.
Under Google's model of the web, pages that do not acquiesce to an online advertising company's secretive ranking system may become nondiscoverable, despite the fact that they may indeed match the user's query. Computers assist us in searching through data but "relevance" is ultimately decided by the user. That is why we can have HN threads that claim search result quality is declining. Though they may be slower, humans can determine relevance better than any computer. From the disclosures of Matt Cutts and others we know that humans are involved in Google's ranking implementation. Penalties are used. The search process is not 100% math/computer-based. However, in Google's model of the web, filtering results is the exclusive domain of the online advertising company and only the humans on its payroll, not the user performing the search. There is no option to disable the online advertising company's "assistance" in filtering.