In a world where the internet is growing at an astounding rate, we have access to much more content than we ever did before. Every day there is more content online. Every day search engines are indexing more and more pages, and that means publishers are competing even harder for their share of voice in search engine results.
It’s nothing new that clever SEO experts create content and pages that is only for search engines, in an attempt to try to manipulate where they show up in the search results. These pages don’t tend to have great keyword densities, but aren’t very useful to humans. You should see where I am going with this. How can a machine know when a page isn’t that useful to a human if a human is trying really hard to trick a machine into thinking that page is for a human? How do we help out the bloating web?
This is a message I wrote to Google today. I wouldn’t say it’s a great idea, but I felt it was worth sharing…
If Google Search’s aim is to provide a user with the most relevant search results for a given search term, which I believe it is, then it would be nice for logged in users to be able to mark Google search results that are irrelevant.
For example. If you go to www.google.co.za, and search for “organic whey protein” then choose results from South Africa, Google’s returns some decent pages. However one article by “thatman.co.za” is an article made up of non-human readable english. I am sure it’s got a great keyword density, but it is not a relevant page for me and my search term because (I’m assuming) it’s designed for search engines, not a human.
If I, being human, could tell the search engine when a page was irrelevant, that information could be used to make search results more relevant to humans next time. Then if a search engine like Google cross referenced which users marked the same articles, you could give their feedback a greater relative weighting, as those users would more likely be providing accurate information, and less likely to be people trying to remove their competitors from search results.
I feel like it could work like Facebooks feedback on wall posts does, with a little tool that appears when you roll over a post, which has the tools to remove from stream or mark as spam or inappropriate.
I think that kind of thing would help.
