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It's always very tempting to just write endless articles on nothingness to draw more SE visitors, but I refrain, in the hope that one day, the Voting Buttons will matter.
I think the buttons are a great idea (though I'm sure there are a few exploitability isssues with them) and I can't wait for them to become a major factor.
Does anyone have any more info on the voting buttons? I'd be very interested to know :) Mr G? :)
[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 12:32 pm (utc) on Oct. 18, 2003]
Also, I just activated the voting buttons on the GTB, then unplugged my computer from my network, and voted on this posting page. Guess what? It did the exact same thing that it does when it is in the network...
It made my computer go "beep".
Don't fool yourself.
There's never been anything said about those voting buttons and it's doubtful there will be.
ummmmmm. There's no more voting button. Upgrade your toolbar. It's been replaced by an add link to Blogger button. Guess why.
ummmmmm. There's no more voting button.
Ooops. Just found it under options. Still. Use the you-know-what out of the Blogger button.
Aside from everything else we might or might not do, we still *are* the searching public. And in spite of whatever we may or may not know, being on this side of the SEO fence, things can look completely different from the perspective of the end user, which is the "searching for what we want or need at the moment" side of things.
I think everyone wins if we can manage to keep the duality of that perspective in mind.
Assuming a clever/secure framework was implemented they could be the only 'real' way a SE would ever know the whos-who of the net.
OT: Kazaa needs them too.
Unless it's their competitors' sites who are beating them in the SERPs. ;)
And the only people voting will be the people with toolbars. Hmmm, the vast majority of those would be in what profession?
No thank you.
I don't mind if google collects and uses the information in some way to check the quality of their results, but it absolutely should not use them as a factor in the rankings.
I think that if "Web Designer" types vote for sites that are pretty, then the trends should become apparent and their preferences could be used to give other "Web Designer" types some URLs that they might like too.
The same goes for people interested in art, music, whatever.
- People who like this page also like...
- People who visit this page also visit...
Then; I think that the 'search for pages with the search words that are [liked¦visited] by people with your tastes' would be amazing.
I'd vote for restaurants I like in the UK each time I come across their sites. Then I'd search for 'restaurant some-place' and I'd get some really nice recommendations. Like Google Sets [labs.google.com], but for sites. That would be a feature worth paying for IMO.
Good point ciml.
I sure hope they make those buttons active and use the results as the ONLY basis for ranking the serps. My daily SEO would be so much easier. I could just sit there and repeatedly vote for my site with hand and repeatedly vote against my competitors with the other.
That'll never happen and that's exactly why. People like you are why I stopped paying for PPC. You'd just click on my link until my budgeted max is reached. Have you ever heard of ip logging? Don't think that they wouldn't use it to disqualify your unethical use of the voting button.
With millions of people voting you would not see 'webdevelopers' in those trends.
People would, as a general rule, vote when they were pleased with the relevancy of their search.
Even my mum is getting annoyed when she can't find what she's looking for. People are sick of adverts and overly flashy crap. They're looking for a site that is relevant to their search and IMHO would vote accordingly.
There's a real disconnect between the "voting buttons" and relevancy of a search.
First off, who is most likely to have the toolbar installed? It is not the average user. In fact, it creats reaults that are incredibly biased towards a certain category of users, Windoze users that use IE as their primary browser. They have to be sophisticated enough to have installed the toolbar, but not sophisticated enough to have switched to other browsers or operating systems.
The most rabid users of the toolbar will be web professionals, many of whom produce sites that are precisly the sort that I am *not* interested in. In fact, I am quite disinterested in the results of the voting by the sort of people that would bother to vote for pages. When most people find a site that is exactly what they want, they are more interested in digging in to the details, than they are thinking "I need to vote for this page". In fact some of the most useful pages that I ever find, are those that I would be willing to bet that I am the only person out of everyone that has the toolbar installed, that has ever been to that page.
As to using it to consider the relevancy to the search term, that is not how the voting is set up. You are voting on the page you are currently on. You did not even have to find it by searching for it.
I could search for a page on cow flatulence affecting global warming, follow some random links to a page on skydiving wearing a chicken suit. What a cool page that is, I should vote for it.
It sure is relevant to the last search I made.
Then there is the issue of relevant to whom. Last year someone was complaining that a search on "costa rica" was returning totally irrelevant results, it had a museum in the first slot instead of travel sites. He was declaring it to be irrelevant. Well, if I go to Costa Rica, I am turing in miles for my airline ticket and staying with an old friend who lives on Jaco Beach. Why would I want a bunch of totally irrelevant travel sites to come up, when I don't need that stuff. Give me some links to the natural history.
In fact, it creats reaults that are incredibly biased towards a certain category of users
Can't argue, very true
You are voting on the page you are currently on. You did not even have to find it by searching for it.
Good point, but I'd assume the toolbar would filter collection in a way that would determine if a vote was via RP or not
but not sophisticated enough to have switched to other browsers or operating systems.
Lol, tnx I feel *very* sophisticated and I'm using ie :)
