Around the Net
Google Gives Users Site Control
- eWeek, Friday, March 11, 2011 11:37 AM
With the click of a button, Google users can now blacklist any Web site from all future search results -- and, perhaps unknowingly, help the search giant differentiate "good" sites from "bad." "The search engine is now showing an option ... to let users block a particular domain in the future," eWeek reports. It's all "part of the company's evolving push to give its 1 billion-plus searchers more control."
What's more, according to Google: "While we're not currently using the domains people block as a signal in ranking, we'll look at the data and see whether it would be useful as we continue to evaluate and improve our search results in the future."
"Chillingly for fans of the ‘free Web,' that's a statement which suggests Google might yet further refine its search function to effectively whitewash its search results," writes The Register. "Will those of us who don't work for Google be able to see which sites people block most often?" Forbes asks. Not so much, as a Google spokesman explains: "We don't currently have any plans to publish this data."
Bigger picture, "The move is the latest by Google in response to complaints that its results have become increasingly filled with content from so-called ‘content farms' and other low-quality sites," paidContent writes. Applauding Google's efforts, Fortune is encouraging the company to take filtering to the next level. "It would make a lot of sense to expand [its filtering efforts] into a better search product -- even a social one," Fortune writes. "For instance, if Google gave me the option of not only blocking my sites, but also blocking sites that my friends don't like, I'd certainly be interested in checking out the results."
What's to prevent a concerted effort on a group to "blacklist" a particular site?
I'm with Greg. I can already hear the off-shore wheels turning, creating an entire cottage industry on blocking the competition. What's your blacklisting budget next year?
Google will have to do something they don't like to do - be more transparant about how they do things.
This is a big win for premium quality publishers. It's also a win for users. Kudos Google on the change and on continuing to innovate.
It's a major step in "dynamic" results on a per users/per browser basis and it does raise some questions. If this is on a per browser level, what happens when I use a public computer and someone blocked Wikipedia because they don't trust it (but I love it)? While our searches have for some time varied based on geography and other variable Google drops into the algorithm, with user filtering in the mix, we'll all eventually have very different search experiences. Should be interesting...
I like that this prevents malicious blacklisting by groups. However, this is just an incremental step towards better results and I'm fearful it will take a long time before "my" blacklisting will actually benefit "my" searches. They will have to evolve into a crowd-source to accelerate the benefits for the user and quality sites. Perhaps having some avatar that I can use as a blacklist proxy.