What Would You Like To See Google’s Webspam Team Tackle In 2009?
Posting at multiple forums won’t be an excellent idea to attract Google’s attention nor could I find any option contacting Google for this, and the superstition that the people at Google may dump this silly didn’t call me to action. So I went ahead tailoring Google to suit my needs. googleMT is a move in this direction customizing Google search in such a way that it searches a set of predefined sites related to medicine or medical transcription first and if the data searched is not in this set of sites, it will then search the rest of the web.
Now, Google’s unofficial mouthpiece Matt Cutts came up to lend his ears (unofficial earpiece now!!!) on what Google’s webspam team has to tackle in 2009 to make Google better! Here is what he said:
It’s the beginning of the year, so I just wanted to get some outside opinions: what would you like to see Google’s webspam team tackle in 2009? Here’s how I asked for suggestions in 2006:
Based on your experiences, close your eyes and think about what area(s) you wish Google would work on. You probably want to think about it for a while without viewing other people’s comments, and I’m not going to mention any specific area that would bias you; I want people to independently consider what they think Google should work on to decrease webspam in the next six months to a year.
Once you’ve come up with the idea(s) that you think are most pressing, please add a constructive comment. I don’t want individual sites called out or much discussion; just chime in once with what you’d like to see Google work on in webspam.
Enthusiastically, I registered there my expectations like this:
My suggestions as a blogger what I would expect from Google:
1) I get a lot of link buying offers though I have placed a warning on my contact page that I will flag link buying offers to Google Webspam Team. If I could really flag that messages to Google, I think it will be beneficial to Google to spot those secret link buyers.
2) Be transparent in penalties. If you could transfer the reason for penalties if any imposed on a site through web master console, the web masters could rectify the mistakes had it occurred due to their ignorance.
3) Sites found with viruses: Same as suggestion #2.
4) Better customer service: At least a one-sentence reply that “Google will look into the matter and get back to me” if I report anything to Google especially reconsideration requests if any.
My suggestions as a web surfer:
1) Spam local maps.
2) Still better search results, re: For eg., just now I searched for bakers cyst synonyms and the first result that I got was from a respectful site which has these terms in the title tag but the content has “No entries found.”
3) In this era of Google, the relevance of directories does not exist for searching anything. So no results from directories of any sort, even your pet DMOZ.
4) I’m still getting doorway pages or link pages whatever you call it for searches I make.
5) I tried to compile a list of some companies that are into one particular business and while searching for some company names, I got fed up with “aboutus.com” coming at top of the results page instead of a particular company’s web site.
6) Personalizing my search: I will be much pleased if I have an option to exclude some sites appearing in my search results for some information that I’m searching for. Eg., Wikipedia, answers.com.
Still I may come back again to put in here all those things that I may have forgot to write in one go.
I forgot to mention that earlier I tried the option with the tilde sign, ~bakers cyst, but still didn’t have satisfactory results. It has got many synonyms like: Posterior herniation of the knee joint, popliteal cyst, synovial cyst, peritendinitis serosa, myxoid cyst, ganglion, gastrocnemius-semimembranosus bursa, semimembranosus bursa etc.
Later when somebody poked me up that personalized search is already available for a few months, I clarified my stand like this:
Personalizing my search: You may be talking about removing/voting/hiding the sites after the search has been done, but I want an option even before that, a query parameter to exclude some sites that I do not want to see in my search results right on my first query itself. With the current available personalization, you can vote/hide a site for one particular search but for another search that site may prop up again in my results.
Neither Google search preferences nor Advanced Search have options for this! May be I’m ignorant! Can you help?
I have already registered my views for improvising Google search results in 2009 and tweeted for action to convey your suggestions to Google tackling webspam. (Like to follow me on Twitter?) You too might have got pegged or annoyed multiple times while searching Google! Would you like to register your views on what Google needs to tackle in webspam in 2009? Please don’t make it here. Make it on Matt Cutts’ (Google Webspam team head) blog post where Matt Cutts requests suggestions on “What Google’s webspam team need to tackle in 2009?” Limit your comments to only webspam and what we expect from Google while improvising search results and not on any other Google products.
Update: The complaints of “No entries found” pages has grabbed Matt Cutts’ attention especially the complaint about Baker’s cyst that I took it to his notice, along with 20 such complaints from others, and has provoked Google’s action against no results pages, further feedback on this issue has been called as this needs to be worked on as top priority action against web spam in 2009. Congrats to Matt Cutts for swift action in this regard.
Tags: Google tackling webspam, Google's webspam team, improvising Google search, make Google better
