
Google, It Wasn’t Broke - soundsop
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/21/google-it-wasnt-broke/
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koraybalci
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..

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robg
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.

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blasdel
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_?

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iigs
This was my immediate thought. Going half way from search to youtube comments
is a drastic step down/back.

Even in his screenshot you can see he gave the up arrow to everybody who gave
him a compliment, without regard to merit, and he down-arrowed the only
comment that was more than "uh yay blog!".

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maurycy
Before clicking I thought they mean Gmail.

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Shamiq
You're not liking the new looks either? When I signed in, I thought: Where did
my email go?

I have become quite accustomed to glancing at the UI to figure out what's
going on with my email. I was supremely confused for a minute.

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iamwil
You can always revert back to the old theme, though I have to admit, their
default theme was a bit caustic to the eyes.

On second thought, maybe it's like that to encourage people to look for where
they can change the themes.

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timcederman
The whitespace is still different. I'm amazed at how used to the UI I got --
I'm finding it quite disconcerting.

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iamwil
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.

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redorb
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.

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jreposa
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.

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justindz
"Re-ranked search results, however, are only seen by the signed-in user and do
not affect other people's results."

[http://www.pcworld.com/article/154310/google_adds_customizat...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/154310/google_adds_customization_feature_to_internet_search.html)

Nasty comments, well, that one does share.

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timcederman
So is everyone seeing this now?

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

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ram1024
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?

