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by toddmorey·15y ago·view on hn ↗
Google's service to me, the customer, is fast, useful search results. There is no way they've confused their real customers for spam sites... that's just too short-sighted and there are zero barriers to people switching if a competitor with better results came along. But here's what I don't get: Lots of companies implement customer feedback to improve their services. I can't decide why Google hasn't done some sort of browser plugin (or other approach) that allows you very simply thumbs down a site when it's a not useful result. Enough negative feedback from real users and a site could be demoted in organic search. Is that just too hard to build in a way that couldn't be easily gamed?

Edit: I know they experimented with voting arrows on the results page and I'm curious why some variant of that hasn't been deployed more widely.

2 comments
There's a Chrome extension for reporting spam: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/efinmbicabejjhja...

No idea how seriously these reports are taken, and whether or not something like the fake Mastercam blog would be considered spam.

I wonder about this, too. My guess is that they are afraid people would make fake accounts and game the system, though people are gaming the system with link farms anyway, so... I think another comment that I saw on a different article had the right idea where they should use the votes that people in your social network make, that way some Spammer making a fake account and upvoting stuff won't affect you unless you are friends with him.