Google, It Wasn’t Broke

Huh, I think it's a brilliant idea. Every site (including here) using a voting system nowadays. And from data collection point of view it will possibly help google enhance its results. And unlike techcrunch author, I didn't find it annoying or complicated at all.. It's funny how people's perceptions are..

Feels like New Coke to me.

They're already using click-based metrics to tweak PageRank. I don't see how one additional data point will radically improve anything.

Worse, in stealing features it shows they're out of ideas for their core product even while it doesn't need them.

New Coke.

Google already has the terrible burden of moderating YOUTUBE COMMENTS. What made them think it would be a good idea to set up a peanut gallery for every unique URL?

Before clicking I thought they mean Gmail.

As I understood it, the search results that you change are only local to you. Other people don't really see them.

Because of that, I think Google can encourage the behavior where people are sending links relevant to themselves up to the their front page in an honest way. If they click things up that have no relevance to themselves, they only screw up their own searches.

So if you have millions of people sending things relevant to themselves up the list, Google is basically gathering data about what the human 'gold standard' for a particular search query is (augmented by machine sorting first).

In information retrieval, one of the hard things is to know whether you've done a better job of returning search results or not, since a gold standard dataset is hard to come by and time consuming to produce.

Here, I think Google is simply using a mechanism where they're aligning people's self-interest to create accurate data they can use to compare their search algorithm tweaks.

All in all, a good thing. Even better if you can 'merge' search results from others that you trust..say your friends. I wouldn't mind merging my search results with _why's. More complexity that way, though.

This whole system relies on something that hasn't been demonstrated on the internet; human honesty - I see every web page owner leaving the comments of greatness for their sites; and every competitor doing the opposite.

As a startup founder, I see this as a bit worrisome. What if you got a digg bury brigade to start clicking on the 'Remove' button or posting nasty comments about your brand.

We'll be keeping a close eye on this.

So is everyone seeing this now?

Soon there will be another post on TC saying "this is teh awesomest thing evar!!!11!!".

are they saying google is a perfect product such that innovation and progress are no longer necessary?

google obviously doesn't want to get leapfrogged in "technology" in the one area that is its proven moneymaker. it's going to continue to roll out "new" features to stay ahead (and stay relevant).

did techcrunch cry this much when google rolled out the autocomplete searchsuggest thing?