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Comment by y42 | Hacker News Reader

I totally like the idea but I dare to doubt that this would solve the SEO problem. Website owners who are participating in those notorious affiliate programs or earn money with ads will still use the search engine to drag people onto their generic websites, using methodolgies to fit the search engines ranking mechanisms, no matter if they are public or not.

SEO and all it's results seem to be immanent to the system.

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You can have a semi-manual system, with user input. So websites filled with SEO get manually flagged by users. Of course, you need to trust your users as well... this can be done with a Web of Trust-style reputation system: users endorse each other, and you can build a reputation graph/tree that traces reputation and easily cull bad subtrees. If this endorsement system conserves reputation (you give a fraction of your reputation away each endorsement, and new reputation is never created), then it becomes sybil-proof, where it's not advantageous to create say millions of users to increase reputation.

(previous suggestion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31585340)

why can't all the users that are being paid to promote spam endorse each other? And won't distributed trust systems just make some people "trust billionaires" and others "trust impoverished" though no fault of their own? If everyone trusts Oprah she'll have the types of same power people complain about billionaires people now. Basically influence. Also, anyone who's close to her gets the blessing of her influence where as if you're far removed you get nothing. Seems like the just reproducing the exact thing so many are trying to counter.

Mutual endorsement, if reputation is conservative, is like giving eachother reputation. If both users reputation is equal, there's no net gain (total reputation is always constant).

If one users reputation is higher, there's redistribution, but algorithms would need to carefully weight reputation linearly in all decisions, making redistribution not advantageous, solving any issues with sybil attacks[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack

Well, you need to define your objectives. No system is robust to a failure of all its actors. If every user (and even developer) is ill-intended, no system will give good results. So we need some "hopeful" (and accurate) assumptions.

One might be that the typical user can sensibly elect a few individuals to trust -- it could be developers (which are a natural choice for trust), to activist and publicly visible individuals (even close friends). Then presumably you could adopt his trust model (such individuals could be roots in independent conservative trust webs/graphs). I think a very large number of such webs might be computationally expensive, but hopefully you'd be able to find someone you trust or start your own independent graph (if you trust no one, you'd effectively lose all anti-SEO measures I guess). This very naturally leads to a decentralized reputation system!

I'm hoping that having community moderated search results will limit this problem. The problem will be SEO people trying to infiltrate the community, which may be tricky to solve. But Wikipedia has had to grapple with similar problems, so I think it is solvable.

Sell weekly SEO guids to rank well and punish last weeks tips. (joking)

What you want to do is put the SEO monster in front of your cart and make it do useful work. You basically got an army of hard working people with money to burn who will do anything. What is there to complaint about?

> notorious affiliate programs

Great, detect the affiliate links and downrank them. Ban it completely if the problem is severe or the products are fake/etc.

> earn money with ads

Similar, detect them and downrank. If a particular ad network is knowingly malicious, ban it entirely.

The best thing about this solution is that its an instant competitive advantage that Google will not be able (or willing) to copy.

> SEO and all it's results seem to be immanent to the system.

I believe you mean 'inherent'.

And “its”, not “it’s”, while we are at it.

Google define immanent:

immanent:

adjective

existing or operating within; inherent.

"the protection of liberties is immanent in constitutional arrangements"

synonyms: inherent, intrinsic, innate, built-in, latent, essential, fundamental, basic, ingrained, natural

I stand corrected, didn't realize this.

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