On a public training webinar over a year ago I stated that Google would start experimenting with and eventually implement a user voting system to help them rank sites. Something like a Digg button to thumb up/down sites that would give Google qualitative data to go with their mathematical data used to rank sites.
TechCrunch and Search Engine Journal report today that the first part of my prediction has begun. And now everyone is claiming they saw it coming, lol.
Right now you can only use this feature in Google Labs implementation on personal search. You can re-order results and bump results up and down with an arrow button. You can even entirely delete a site with an “X” button.
The second part of my prediction, that Google will eventually implement a voting system that will go beyond their current measurement of bounce rates by leaps and bounds, is yet to be realized.
But I will stick to my guns and say that people will have a say in the SERPs in some fashion in the future. Algorithms can be manipulated. So can social voting networks. But in order to get qualitative feedback on the value of a page you simply must include the surfer in the equation.
Algorithms cannot determine quality and value, much as the eggheads would like it to be true. People cannot be tricked into thinking something is good or valuable when it is not. That’s why, despite the spamming problems at Digg and elsewhere, the data stays pretty clean and the good content rises to the top.
Gaming The System
In the discussion on this topic in the coming weeks you are going to find hundreds of comments about this kind of system being abused or “gamed.” Let that commentary fall on deaf ears. The system is already being gamed Einstein. By a limiting algorithmic ranking of sites that excludes qualitative feedback from real people who are the only way to determine value, usefulness, and importance of the information they find in the SERPs.
People are going to try to game anything and everything. It’s a fact of life on the web. As is change. Hackers and unethical competitors are not reason enough to halt the evolution of the web. We’d be nowhere today if we were paralyzed at the thought of someone gaming our new ideas and systems.
I say shake it up and bring on a global implementation of qualitative human input for better search results!