With Google making efforts to improve the quality of its search results, it is now giving users the opportunity to block certain sites from search results. The extension would be available for its Chrome browser, and user's actions in blocking sites could become part of Google's fight against spam content."We've been exploring different algorithms to detect content farms, which are sites with shallow or low-quality content," principal engineer Matt Cutts explained. "One of the signals we're exploring is explicit feedback from users."Cutts is the same person who had earlier opined for Google that spam was becoming an increasingly bigger problem for the search site. "We have seen a slight uptick of spam in recent months, and while we've already made progress, we have new efforts underway to continue to improve our search quality," he said in a blog post last month.
There is also something unpleasantly ironic about the idea that google is going to start telling people that the way to get the best results from their search engine is to use their google branded browser in order to get rid of the junk in the google search engine..-mouser (February 15, 2011, 06:44 AM)
If they can't change their algorithms enough to detect this cancer, then a crowdsource effort is a good start. At the least, you won't see the same stuff over and over.
