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civilized

Dumb question - why can't I just upvote and downvote pages, and Google enhances its ranking for me based on that?

Maybe that's why the search "X reddit" is so popular - it's got a bit of that social validation.

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Google already has similar signals:

1. Do you click on the link in the results page?

2. After clicking on that link, do you go back to the search or not?

3. How long do you stay there before coming back?

Adding an explicit up/downvote would capture some additional information, but it would overlap with the above, and most users would ignore the button. I’d guess Google has at some point experimented with this and found it wasn’t worth keeping.

I'm sure they have all sorts of fancy stuff but at the end of the day, there's a lot of SEO garbage at the top of the rankings that I would really love to downvote.

That’s assuming that the goal is to make search better and not say make more money.

A lot of spammy SEO garbage has ads and analytics which are often Google’s, so there’s little incentive to ban these websites.

> Adding an explicit up/downvote would capture some additional information, but it would overlap with the above, and most users would ignore the button. I’d guess Google has at some point experimented with this and found it wasn’t worth keeping.

Sounds pretty ripe for abuse too.

> Sounds pretty ripe for abuse too.

civilized wrote (emphasis by me): "and Google enhances its ranking for me based on that".

It obviously doesn't work, otherwise stackoverflow ad-filled copies wouldn't exist.

Can you give me some?

I love stackoverflow content, but hate the surface, e.g. how it loads jquery from google (???) and if I disable it, then the content breaks, because obviously the only way to implement a toggleable div is when you send your users browsing history to google directly..

You can find much more than just "some" here :) https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter

Note that it's often difficult to tell if these signals are good or bad. For example:

1. Clicking on a link is often a negative signal. If you're searching for "when was barack obama born?", hopefully you get the answer on the search results page itself, so you never have to click. Or, the caption for each search result should have a snippet containing the answer.

2. If you stay a long time on the search result you click on, is it because the information is hard to find or because the page is deep and useful?

I used to work on Search measurement at YouTube and Facebook, and run a human evaluation platform now. Here's an example what they can look like when you use high-quality raters: https://demos.surgehq.ai/google-vs-bing/

Not exactly true. Most people would infrequently use the buttons, but when they do, you can be sure they want it that way.

I would suggest that the big reason not to go down the avenue of social buttons is the inevitable gamification of it. Already we have have ratings farms for apps and amazon. Of course we will have similar if search implemented this.

We know they probably use CTR as a ranking factor. However, a site could just literally add JS code on the page and disable the back button. So I don’t think that would work out that well for Google.

That sounds like a trick that would only work until Google noticed.

Since a few years there’s been plenty of cheap tricks that would’ve earned you a manual ban/downrank back in the day that Google now turns a blind eye to.

Who do you reckon would cast the most votes?

Correct, SEO bots.

If Google can't use it's vast array of user data to tell the difference between SEO bots and non-bot users, what's even the point of it collecting all that fucking data in the first place?

Good point, but I have my reasons for suspecting they can't tell the difference https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31296953

Maybe that's part of how they train it?

I would assume that if Google is paying 10$/hour for humans to rank content, someone else is paying 11$/hour to fool it with a human generating content, clicks, etc.

Additionally, people writing bots learn just like Google learns, and start generating what appears to be legitimate interactions. Same algorithms that fit to critique between 'bot' and 'non-bot' class can be used to create bots that fall into the 'non-bot' category.

It's a losing battle - but what we get is better than we would get if they collected less data.

That’s what’s confusing in the articles that have come out about quality raters.

Quality Raters don’t actually rank websites.

Quality Raters look at websites and answer questions about them. Google then uses that data as a small part of their algorithm to adjust some factors about those sites.

Quality Raters don’t actually rank pages on google.

This isn't correct. I was a quality rater. We spent almost all of our time literally ranking websites.

Your ranking is a signal that goes into the algorithm, not the actual end result.

I understand that. My post never implies that that was the case.

> Quality Raters look at websites and answer questions about them.

Wrong. I was never asked any questions beyond to rank to site quality for a query

> Quality Raters don’t actually rank website

Wrong again. This is what we did. We assessed website rankings for specific queries.

Why do you think you're the only type of rater?

I understand that.

> Quality Raters look at websites and answer questions about them.

Wrong. At least in my case. I was never asked any questions beyond to rank to site quality for a query

Collaborative filtering: not just for movie recommendations anymore?

civilized wrote about enhancing the ranking for the person who casts the vote. Using these votes to do changes in the Google ranking for the general public can of course easily be abused.

Google actually tried that a few years SEO through a google chrome add-on.

I heard it didn’t work very well for them. The results weren’t very good or helpful.

Google used to do this, but they rolled it back because the hard honest truth is most people don't like taking surveys. Behavior is a better and more available signal.

How are you supposed to “engage” with Google search once you’ve downvoted all the spammy ad-ridden garbage and actually get useful results on the first non-ad link?

this used to exist but they got rid of it like 10 yrs ago IIRC

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