In an interesting development, Google has released a new Site Blocker tool that allows the individual to prevent entire domains from displaying results when performing Google searches.
The purpose of the new tool is give users the power to block domains that they believe to be offensive – either due to the site content or the quality of the site. The theory is that this filtering out such sites on a user level will provide a better, more relevant searching experience for the individual.
It’s an interesting development, because it opens up the possibility of very legitimate sites being blocked by a large number of users just because of personal preferences. Imagine what would happen to Amazon or Ebay if somebody started a huge campaign to block their domains from all search results – what would the online shopping market look like then?
However, the major power of this new development lies in the data that will stored from users blocking sites. In Google own words – “while we’re not currently using the domains people block as a signal in ranking, we’ll look at the data and see whether it would be useful as we continue to evaluate and improve our search results in the future”. That seems like a pretty clear indication that Google will be closely monitoring blocked site data from now on. If certain sites get a high level of blocks from users, then they are likely to be marked as spam and see their rankings decline accordingly.
It’s another wake up call for sites publishing offensive, low-quality or irrelevant material, that they won’t be able to get away with it for ever. I’m certainly in favour of anything that drives an improvement of web content. However, the one concern I have is that there are a lot of very conservative people in the World and that abuse of this feature could put us on another step down the line to online censorship, which is a pretty alarming thought.
The new feature is rolling this month on google.com in English for people using Chrome 9+, IE8+ and Firefox 3.5+ so it won’t be here in the UK for a while. However, they will be expanding to new regions, languages and browsers soon – so keep your eyes pealed. The blocked results are also stored in your Google Account so you’ll need in order to use it.
If you want to read more about the new feature, then check out the article on Google’s Blogspot: Hide sites to find more of what you want.
subscribe
I have very real concerns over censorship as well. While I may not agree with everything on the Internet I do value the right to make the choice to view or not. In the hands of the moral majority this could signal the end of the Internet as we know it.
I think you sum it up pretty accurately there. Yes, this is an interesting feature that will, for the most part, be used appropriately by users to deal with spam or poor quality sites. However, the large concern is people that will abuse this feature.
Personally speaking, I’m in favour of the move as I think that it will finally see the decline of some sites that somehow still manage to remain top of the rankings despite incredibly poor quality content. Whether this is the ‘end of the internet as we know it’ though is another matter. I doubt that this will radically change much, yes it may see a shake up of the Google rankings, but overall, we have laws in place to prevent censorship so there’s no direct threat of that starting here, this is merely personal choice.
The only issue, as I mentioned, was the abuse this will get. If that then starts to affect the Google rankings and good quality sites suffer, then it becomes a problem that will have to be rectified. The question is, do Google have the guts to go back on their new system?
One month after, as the update spread across the other countries, we see some changes in that initial declaration from Google.
First, the Google web spam team said that they weren’t directly using this data to decrease site rankings, but what they do is evaluate their new algorithm tweaks on this data to see if they are able to spot spam sites the same way a user would. This is a really bad idea I think, since these rankings could be misused to massively report a competitor site as spam. So it just moves the problem.
The second issue on censorship is pretty scary too but time will tell how it goes.
I’m worried that the next step will be to make an individuals choices contribute to an overall rating that will diminish the ranking of websites. Such a method could be used by your competitors to put you at a disadvantage.
I don’t agree with censorship but as long as this is a choice on behalf of the user and not something automatically implemented by Google then it can’t be a bad thing. I think there’s no doubt though that this information will be quite valuable to Google and how they rank websites.
It seems that Google has rolled this out to identify what their users deem are irrelevant, and probably identify the reason why. Now tracking has been a very important method to identify how to improve things. What to do with that data, now that’s the big question.
I really don’t see that point of the site blocking. I’ve never had an time where I thought it would be useful, and actually I find the way that it attracts your attention irritating.