Google Crowdsourcing Crap Removal

Pay attention Microsoft, Google just hatched another good idea you may want to embrace and extend only to lie in the face of proof about it with finesse matched only by OJ Simpson.

Among the most vast math quests man has spent many of man’s man hours fighting is Google’s war on link/content farms, hacking/phishing/fraud operations and just plain-old –shitty websites from being listed in their Search rankings. In fact just a post below there was a high profile case involving some massive ball of slime which hurt other businesses that Google failed to spot for a very long period of time, enough of a period to make this rather serious.

Today Google announced a new Chrome extension where by its users, when Googling something, in blue next to where you’d find Similar and Cached for each item users see, for example, Block wmpusers.com. If you click that, just as if you told Adblock to block one of our ad banners it missed on some porn site, it reports to Google that you and, if you’re right, a bunch of other people think that site is just a content farm operation to build up traffic for MobilityDigest and not actually a sweet site about Microsoft’s badass mobile efforts. Google goes in and takes a closer look and if it is in fact what people are claiming by means of this extension, Google gives that site a taste of its own banhammer.

A flag here and a flag there probably won’t result in anything other than Google not listing that return in that particular user’s subsequent searches but for sites that get flagged a hundred times maybe, then they take a closer look either mathematically or by hand. Or a mixture. I don’t picture the majority of web surfers out there both using Chrome and using this extension diligently but it only takes, say, sixteen thousand users to make this an effective weapon.

Maybe Google should just spare Microsoft’s Suggested Sites acrobatic reconfiguration and open source this thing or hell, just let them plug Bing into the data this aggregates. Forget search engine competition and all that "innovation" poppycock – it would help make the world a better place, digitally at least, to give Microsoft another free ride on this. Kind of poetic right there, using scum to fight scum.

Doug Simmons