Quality of search results is of paramount importance to Google (Nasdaq: GOOG). The company simply looks bad if search after search comes up with untrustworthy or otherwise undesirable results near the top of the results list.
Big G works hard to keep those results clean and minty-fresh. But it's a two-way battle: content farms and spammers of various pedigrees do their darndest to grab top spots for popular searches, the better to convert the aimless and the curious into revenue-generating clicks.
So why not enlist some outside help -- from us end-users?
That's exactly what Google has done: As of last week, you can block unwanted sites from appearing in your Google results ever again.
It's a simple enough procedure: Run a search, click on a result, and check it out. If you decide that you don't want results from that resource anymore, you'd go back to the results list and click on "Block all pleasegoaway.com results," and that's that. At the bottom of the results page, you'll then occasionally see something like "You blocked 2 results" from filtered sites, with the option to see those bad eggs anyway, or even go in and manage your list of blocked sites.
The function is complementary to Google Stars, which elevates sites you really like to the top of your search results as appropriate. Together, these two tools replace the old and discontinued SearchWiki tool, which never quite caught on. The new two-tool set seems more intuitive to use, and may become the tightening toolkit we needed all along.
This sure sounds simpler than having Google's crack engineering teams figure out some algorithm to filter out content farms and the like. In particular, content owners can hardly complain and file lawsuits when the dodge is done by the consumer. Shares of content farm operator Demand Media (NYSE: DMD) fell more than 8% the day following Google's unveiling of the blocking tool, presumably for fear that Demand's content might get a lot of thumbs-down votes.
Google says it won't use this data to change result rankings in the short term. This could become another battleground of sorts, as any system can be gamed by paying for star clicks, for example. But if Google can separate honest ratings from paid upheaval efforts, the company would be stupid not to mine that treasure trove of real user input.
And then the copycats will follow: Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) doesn't have anything like these tools in its Bing engine, and neither does Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) and its Bing overlays, but they're clearly not above copying successful ideas.
Did Google just juice its click traffic by making its users happier? Tune in to the next earnings report to know for sure, and add Google to your watchlist so you don't miss the news as it comes in.
