The Substantially Similar Weblog

I’ve noticed lately that increasingly irrelevant results are topping out Google searches. It’s frustrating to see the once vaunted PageRank technology start to fail in the face of determined spammers and quasi-spammers.

For example, I was looking for places to have brunch is Roslindale, where we’ll be moving in August. The top result in a search for “roslindale boston brunch” is this site, which seems to be nothing more than a list of keywords associated with Boston. Sometimes the top result in Google is nothing more than a page with a list of apparently random search terms, apparently attempting to draw you in to some commercial enterprise or pornography.

Is there anything we can do as netizens to fight back and help Google get back on track? I realize it’s not helping much for me to link to the abovementioned site, just further boosting its PageRank. But I wonder if the time has come to move beyond voting by linking, and create some sort of trust-based cooperative Google spam filter. That is, there could be a way to vote against a site and thus diminish its PageRank. Your negative vote, like your positive vote, would also be a function of your PageRank.

I expect the folks at Google are smarter than I and are working diligently to solve this problem. Probably the “negative vote” idea would eventually be attacked by the same evildoers who are screwing up the positive PageRank system. As a friend of mine once said, Google is good, but it’s just one person, and there are tens of thousands of people who are all aligned against it. Eventually it’s going to lose.

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

Δ