My Recommendation To Google - Let Users Ban Sites From Personal Search Results

May 18th, 2007 Davis Posted in Spam, Marketing, Technology, TV, Search, TiVo, Disclosure - I own stock in co. mentioned, Netflix |

Over the last few years, Google has become essential to how I surf the web. Whether it’s their minimalistic advertising or their superior search results, Google has become a daily staple in my internet diet.

Last year, I signed up for Google’s personalized search program and after a year using the program, I’ve got to give it mixed results. This program has been a little bit controversial, because it allows Google to tie your search results to a unique profile.

Overall though, I don’t tend to worry too much about Google abusing this power and having access to filtered personalized search results, along with trend analysis on my queries, more than makes up for the small piece of my privacy that I have to give up.

In looking through my search stats, it wasn’t surprising to see TiVo and Netflix as my top two most requested results, but I was shocked to realize that I’ve searched Google over 22,000 times, in just the last year alone. The bulk of these searches were made during prime time television hours, which I found to be a little bit surprising. I’m not sure what it can tell me about my internet usage, but with 15,000 of my search queries coming during prime time hours, it highlights how much of an impact TiVo and the internet have had, on my television watching.

While Google’s personalization technology has largely improved my search experience, there is still quite a bit of room for improvement.

What I like about Google’s recommendations, is that it learns which sites I have a bias towards and will rerank my search results, according to my own personality. The downside to Google’s personalization program is that there is no way to tell Google, when they get a search woefully wrong.

The more powerful that Google has become, the more that people have tried to game the system. Whether it’s blackhat SEO tricks or coordinated Google bomb campaigns, it’s important to remember that Google’s results aren’t always unbiased. They can give a higher weighting to sites that you have already been to, but there is no way to tell them when a site is really search spam.

There are a lot of times that I am searching and an About.com article will pop up near the top. Now I know some people like the site, but I think About.com has to be one of the most worthless places on the net to find information. It is an ad factory that is highly dependent on Google for their profits. Google should give me a nuclear button that I can hit, that would permanetely ban About.com listings from any of my future search results. If enough users started banning a site, they could adjust their alogrithm to take into account the liklihood, that the result was really search spam.

Google’s About.com results are so bad, that someone actually took the time to write a Greasemonkey script, that will strip out the About.com results from Google, at the browser level. While this does offer me a way to remove About.com from my internet life, it’s really not a mass market solution and it doesn’t solve the countless other lame search results, that pollute what you’re really looking for.

I’m glad that Google is out there innovating and I see a lot of positive benefits to using their recommendation engine, but Google needs to do a better job of harnessing the power of their readers, to help make our search results even more relevant. Giving users the ability to blacklist a site from Google would be extreme, but with the SEO firms able to automate massive amounts of fake content, it is going to take the help of the masses, if Google wants to take control back.