NetNose

Interesting rating system

[anallawalla]

http:**www.netnose.com

There was some speculation about its spider back in April but it seems to be live and taking free site submissions.

Of interest is the NetNose Rating System. Click the Rate Now link and you will get to "rate" various keywords for relevancy. Sometimes, if you rate a word as "Wrong" then you get to pick a better keyword.

I thought that it only showed one-word keywords until I saw some that were 2-word, so it seems that many site submitters think of keywords as single words.

- Ash

[pixel_juice]

I was really impressed with the concept, and I enjoyed rating some other people's sites for a few minutes ;)

I had a few problems with their rating windows cropping up all over the place though.

I found the results and algo to be fairly sound too. Weighted random results anyone? And specifying your own keywords might be open to some abuse ;)

Anyway, thumbs up from me, and I will be keeping an eye on it. Thanks Ash :)

[werty]

I remember talking about this back then...glad it finally works...mystery solved.

I added some pages and ranked a few others... Not expecting much traffic, but any would be nice.

In the preferences you can filter out, or make exclusive "buy sites" as well as adult content. A few other interesting setting as well.

I can see it becoming popular for adult searches.

[Marketing Guy]

I believe the webmaster is a member here. I recall chatting to him about it not long ago.

I thought it was a good concept at the time, but im still unsure how many people would take the time to rate pages / sites. But, I believe there are other factors and options available to be filtered in.

Scott

[netnose]

that's right - we have been visiting webmasterworld for several years but are new members. We hope to become useful contributors in the years to come. Were always listening to your comments and ideas. If you have questions we will do our best to provide thoughtful answers.

Yes, raters are key to relevant search results. Some people rate web sites daily while others rate a couple sites once in a while. Every rating counts so we are working to make the process fun and easy. That's why NetNose is sign up and survey free.

[pixel_juice]

Hey netnose! Welcome to webmasterworld :)

Could you give us any idea of the volume of traffic your getting or the number of active 'raters' you have?

As I mentioned above, I liked the site and i'll be doing some more rating when I get a chance :)

>>Every rating counts so we are working to make the process fun and easy. That's why NetNose is sign up and survey free.

Maybe an optional member scheme might help to encourage repeat raters - you could introduce some kind of incentive this way.

[netnose]

Thanks for the welcome and the positive feedback pixel_juice.

As you saw in previous threads about our spider, we have been working on this for a while behind closed doors (passworded). It has been only one month since we opened the system to the public and response has been great so far.

If fact we have more active raters at this point than we anticipated we would. Currently we have enough raters to almost keep up with the flow of new web site submissions.

However, we believe this will increase as we get more exposure to the general public. Up to now most of our exposure has been to webmasters, but the number of end users appears to be growing. We will be releasing a beta of our toolbar soon, which should also help to increase the number of raters.

>>Maybe an optional member scheme might help to encourage repeat raters - you could introduce some kind of incentive this way.

Actually, we do have some options here to offer incentives, but response has been good enough so far. If we do decide to offer incentives in the future it will still be without a signup process. We believe the best raters are volunteers.

[jrobbio]

Hey netnose great idea, 1 problem.
I'd love to see a setting where I can just see kids, info, how etc.etc. only or select from a list the ones I would like.

The reason I say this is there are loads of sites that I have absolutely no interest in viewing and it may make people inclined to give bogus results or continue to skip wasting time.

Your settings don't allow for this yet apart from allowing buy sites or not, but I could see myself using it more often if I was allowed to remove some of my non-interests.

Rob

[netnose]

Thanks for your feedback Rob,

We have been considering the idea of providing groupings of sites to rate. Most likely, those groupings will be in some way tied to the current categories list as you mentioned if we decide to use them. For now we are waiting to see how people react to the current system, including our toolbar (when released), before we make that change. Currently the rating system is dominated by webmasters submissions, which we anticipated would happen in the beginning. When we release the toolbar we are hoping to inspire more users to begin submitting the sites that they find causing a much wider array of sites to be included in your rating sessions.

[bunltd]

Hi, Netnose. Interesting - I rated a number of sites, boy that could get addictive... But something I noticed: even with English selected, I was given the opportunity to rate sites in other languages (German, Italian) - maybe the site didn't choose the correct language when they submitted - or maybe that part of the ratings system filter needs a nudge. Can't rate what I can't read.

It was interesting to see that most sites did not provide phrases but single words.

LisaB

[netnose]

Correct the first time LisaB

We have seen it happen a few times, where sites have been submitted with the wrong language. We are already looking into ways to fix this. With some we may be able to catch it through automatic means (i.e. pre-fetch page encoding), but many languages fall under the latin1 charset which means no automatic way to identify which sites contain what language. For now just hit the trashcan icon when you see one of these to dump it from the rating system.

>>It was interesting to see that most sites did not provide phrases but single words.

Since each word is scored individually and these scores are combined when searching, single words work very well. There is no real advantage to using a phrase unless you require that the two words not be considered separately in another search (i.e. Los Angeles).

Thanks for the feedback.

[sidyadav]

Hey NetNose,
I enjoy rating on your website.
But it could be a lot easier if you could select what sort of topic or sites you want to rate. Because one time I was rating and some sites were so boring , I didn't even want to rate and I couldn't understand what the site is all about.
Please think about adding this feature to your rating system :-)

Thank you,
Regards,
Sid

[Chndru]

It's fun and addictive...wish the interface could be better rather than an unpleasant pop-up and those tiny icons. :-(

[sidyadav]

true

[netnose]

Sid:
Your request is being considered. We have projects in the works that we believe will get more regular users to submit sites which should help mix up the type of sites found in the rating system a bit more. (ie more diversity in topics) A majority of submissions are still coming from webmasters so the rating database is a bit biased (ie more business/boring sites). After we have all the new systems in place we will make a decision on allowing raters to select category groups to rate from. We prefer to keep it fully random if possible for two reasons: Better fraud control, and a better chance of a rater discovering a new site he/she might never have found otherwise.

There is a "Non-documented feature" that might make your rating sessions less boring if you want to try it. You can eliminate sites from your rating session that were marked as commerical (BUY) sites when they were submitted by changing the Commercial filter in Settings under search filters to "Remove". This will not stop sites that were not originally marked as BUY that might be commercial from getting into your rating sessions, but it will reduce the number. The only hitch is you will need to remember to set this back to "Include" when you are done rating or these sites will also be removed from your searches.

Chndru & Sidyadav:
One of the projects we are currently working on. There will be an alternative interface.

Thanks for the feedback everyone.

[sidyadav]

Thanks Netnose,
I really look forward to seeing the new features in action!

Regards,
Sid

[anallawalla]

netnose,

How long does it take for a submission to be indexed? One site I submitted (when I started this thread) is visible, the other is not. Does it need to be rated by someone first?

[netnose]

anallawalla:

Generally new submissions are searchable within a week at most (Rating is truly Random). On average I would start looking for your site to be listed in about three days and re-submit if you don't find it within seven. As noted on the site this is a beta and one of the areas we have been working on is the new submission fraud control systems. It is definately possible one of our fraud control mechanisims caused the site to not make it into the rating system at that time. Many of these systems have already been changed and improvements made so we will not loose as many sites while we are tweaking these systems.

[SlowMove]

Some of the other search enginges have a strong prejudice against dynamic pages, as if the webmasters are trying to pull a fast one using JavaScript, etc. That doesn't seem to be an issue with this type of rating system.

[netnose]

Correct, Netnose cares very little about the method used to construct your site. If people find your content relevant to your search terms you will be listed and score well.

The only exception to this is with redirecting pages. Netnose does not like pages that redirect. Please submit the actual web site main page, not a redirecting url.

Netnose