
Curation is the New Search is the New Curation - atularora
http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2011/01/curation_is_the.html
======
angrycoder
Chrome just needs to put a 'mark as spam' button right in the browser which
could then be used to augment their current ranking system.

Isn't that pretty much how spam filtering for email works? If enough people
say something is garbage, it goes in the toilet. The user is still free to
look in the toilet, but usually they don't need to.

~~~
nkurz
This isn't necessarily false, but I think it's too simplistic to work well.
How long before it too is being gamed?

The current PageRank system is essentially that the creators of web content
vote for what ranks highly based on what they link to, with the strength of
their vote based on the strength of their incoming votes. Seeing that this
difficult to compromise system is falling to pieces, I worry that an easy to
game system such as you suggest will be laid to waste within days.

Email filtering is a bit different, since you can only vote down the things
that you've been sent. It's difficult for you to mark your competitors
correspondence as spam since you never have a chance to vote on it. Whereas
with search, you can vote on anything you choose to search for.

There's also the question of whether it's really in Google's best interest to
remove the spam. It's a plausible argument that they have no easy way out ---
if they remove all the links to spam sites hosting Google ads, it's entirely
possible that their revenue would fall precipitously. To argue that they need
to remove spam, one first needs to conclude that they benefit from doing so.

I have more hope that a 3rd party might be able to solve this. Offer a series
of browser plugins for Firefox/IE/Chrome that will allow you to black list
sites from search results? Everything you mark is blacklisted for you forever,
and once there is a consensus (likely with human oversight) it's globally
blacklisted as well? AdBlock essentially works on this model, so it should be
possible.

ps. Google already offers an official Chrome extension that does much of what
you suggest:
[https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/efinmbicabejjhja...](https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/efinmbicabejjhjafeidhfbojhnfiepj?hl=en).
It's somewhat ironic to note that many of the 'user reviews' for it on that
page are actually spam.

------
dekz
It amazes me that Yahoo doesn't want to keep/use delicious. What an amazing
database of user voted content.

~~~
Detrus
Yes, but it's only a matter of time until it gets gamed. Google could index it
to find less spammy content for a while.

Ultimately you need to know who is who, who is posting what. Is that what
their internet ID lobbying is about?

~~~
MikeCapone
That's the real problem. The stakes are huge, so eventually most systems get
gamed by spammers.

Maybe they could have meta-moderators (crowd-sourced?) like Slashdot has (had?
haven't been there in a while). People who review what people have reported as
spam, and only the top 5% most trusted and consistent accounts would be used
to actually influence live rankings.

For a spammer to get there, he would have to do lots of good work for a while,
and risk losing that top spot as soon as he starts trying to do spammy stuff.

Maybe it would work... Any obvious way to game such a system?

~~~
krakensden
/.'s system works because the number of users who want to have a discussion
outnumber the people who want to shout obscenities in all caps. That is only
true because there is no money in shouting obscenities in all caps on /.- but
there is plenty of money in upvoting spam on Google. If they switched to
crowdsourced curation today, you'd have have a spammer to user ratio of 10:1
before February 1st.

~~~
MikeCapone
Very good points. Thanks for the reply!

------
nkurz
It makes me wonder: how true is it that the web is too large to curate by
hand? It's remarkable how fast a human can determine that a site is spam, and
with the exception of a few large user-created sites once one has determined
that a few pages on a domain are spam you don't have to look farther.

Kedrosky uses the number (unsure from where) 234 million sites. At $1/site you
could have a number of quite well paid people checking off whether a site is
'real' or 'spam' at a price that Google could easily afford --- if it would
improve their bottom line.

Even if you went page by page, you could figure out a way to build an index of
spam-free pages. But would this really provide sufficient economic benefit? I
think the answer is no, otherwise it would already have been done. What can be
done to change this?

~~~
john_horton
I wonder if you would even need to pay people---someone (google would seem
like an obvious candidate) could write a browser extension with a "total crap"
button. I know I'm sufficiently annoyed when I land on some spammy garbage
that I'd like to punish them with a consequential down vote.

Hopefully you could get enough legitimate uptake to make paying people to
fraudulently vote wouldn't be worth it.

~~~
jakevoytko
Suppose the 4chan hivemind decides to mass-spam your startup with hundreds of
thousands of downvotes over the next few weeks. How would you have any
recourse in situations like that?

~~~
john_horton
You'd probably have to have a trusted human-in-the-loop. I.e., if a site gets
enough down votes, it would trip some internal procedure to review the site.

I think also if you didn't generate public feedback (i.e., you didn't list the
most down voted sites for example) you'd avoid the kind of Beiber-to-DPRK
stunt that 4chan would be interested in.

