Chrome ext: Block sites from serps

[rcjordan]

"If installed, the extension also sends blocked site information to Google, and we will study the resulting feedback and explore using it as a potential ranking signal for our search results."

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/new-chrome-extension-block-sites-from.html

What could possibly go wrong (for a competitor's sites)?

[Gurtie]

I think they're going to struggle again - they had that promote/remove button which applied to your personal SERPs, and they've had the starring thing for ages, but there's a fundamental problem with actual social search which is that people can only really be arsed to join in if they have a vested interest..... we care, webmasters care and possibly people who are trying to find [car hire] and keep seeing sites which are just whitelabels of the same quote system again and again care, but none of those people are going to click buttons for the actual reasons Google needs to get accurate data.

I wonder what the potential for 'stupid webmaster self destruction' is with this btw? People who try and hit competitors by repeatedly sending crap feedback but leave their browsing history and evidence of their own sites (or people who visit these sites also visit this one) open to pattern watching as Google hand review data.

OK, I'm too paranoid. i'm also still not installing Chrome.

[rcjordan]

Since I'm deemed to be old and harmless, I'm running Chrome.  I truly enjoyed nuking wikipedia which has been cluttering up my serps forever.  Now I'm going through Demand Media's stable and shooting their mules.

[bill]

I'm on a Chromium variant, SRWare Iron. It's not connected to the mother-ship like Chrome. This extension scares me a bit...kinda the same way I never let any Google account activate web history. Maybe I'll try it on a virtual machine via Tor.

[Brad]

Scary.  Chrome is the new Google toolbar writ large.  Fortunately, when I tried Chromium I didn't like it.

As Gurtie said, the only people to use this will be those with a vested interest.  You would think Google would have learned that by now.

[4Eyes]

the only people to use this will be those with a vested interest.  You would think Google would have learned that by now.

I think they did - they have so much data on users, it should be pretty simple to segment users into 'joe public' and 'vested interest webmasters', and draw different, but still relevant, conclusions from both sets.

[ergophobe]

Does the extension require users to be logged into a Google account? I think that would be a good measure to help keep it real.

An article I saw recently made me wonder how much Google is using what it learns from Gmail spam reports to identify spam sites and from Priority Inbox to develop machine learning it can use in its search algos.

http://www.google.com/buzz/goog.research.buzz/DvRkTRUBSys/This-paper-is-short-but-sweet-and-quite-accessible

the only people to use this will be those with a vested interest

That depends on what you mean by vested interest. There have been some spam sites on very specific topics that were polluting my serps on searches I do a lot (like perhaps 200 per day in some cases) when I'm in a research phase in my life as a historian. When they become enough of an inconvenience to me, I report them. There was not one single penny on the line for me. My only vested interest in these cases is that they were utter garbage with no useful content, dominated the top results in Google for these searches I was doing and just started bugging the hell out of me. I finally reported them and they disappeared from my serps and I couldn't be happier.

The spammer in question was pretty brilliant and, aside from finding the keyword database that he was using, the site couldn't have taken more than a few hours to put together, so I guess he has dozens or hundreds of them, all with hundreds of thousands and millions of pages. I don't cry for him.

[rcjordan]

Pitchforks in hand:

List of content farms

http://www.jongales.com/blog/2011/02/14/list-of-content-farms/

[eurotrash]

Pitchforks in hand:

List of content farms

http://www.jongales.com/blog/2011/02/14/list-of-content-farms/

Wow!  Seth Godin took a kicking in the comments.

[rcjordan]

>Seth Godin took a kicking in the comments.

Yeah, that was great, wasn't it? And as any BH knows, Squido  um, nevermind.