I'd count that kind of low quality site as spam, and the problem is that there's a basically an infinite supply of them. The boost feature is more interesting in that the curation is at least not a never-ending task. New high quality sites that I know about don't pop up all that often!
It's still not an entirely robust feature since you'll need to do a lot of quality work to prevent mediocre results from a boosted site from shadowing better results from unboosted sites, especially for users with a ton of boosts. But that quality work is much easier to justify when the manual curation is one of your core selling points and used by a large proportion of the customers vs. when it's a feature in a dusty context menu that basically none of the userbase interacts with.
> Maybe 90% of users would ignore this feature. But the 10% of power users maybe disproportionately important
I'd be shocked if the number of users for this kind of feature was anywhere near 10% of all search engine users. Something like 0.1% seems much more likely. But again, if those 0.1% really want that feature it's a great fit for a power user search engine.
It still doesn't mean that it's a feature every search engine should obviously have.
That strikes me as a non-goal. As the search engine, you can't know what attributes a user is valuing when they boost, and so you can't know when it's appropriate to override that boost. "Better" is subjective, contextual, and comes in thousands of different flavors.
But when they do, how are you going to know if all you see is the mediocre spam instead? No, I want to block the domains which are never going to be a good result. This may actually surface things I will want to boost.
NYTimes is another good example, great content for subscribers, essentially useless spam in a search result for non-subscribers. The only person who can configure this is the user.
Is their information of such low quality ?
They’re better now but this is timeless.
I don't think he did. He did say " it's not at all obvious that it's a good idea for an established search engine targeting the general public"
And looking at the data from the link, other than wikipedia and reddit, all the pinned domains are for developers or technical folk.
So it looks to me that kagi is not popular to the general public. If it was, programming-related sites wouldn't so heavily top the popular list.
When you’re first learning a subject you often want simple lies more than complicated truths.
Like pinterest.
Goddamn pinterest.
Just the amount of times i've used "-pinterest" in search is staggering.
Now, I'm not blind to the fact that Reddit's user demographic has a lot in common with us HN folks, while Pinterest... well, not so much. It leans towards a non-techy crowd, with more women users. But the way I see it, if Google keeps popping Pinterest up in search results, someone out there must be finding it helpful.
Perhaps what this all boils down to is a bit of a demographic reality check, rather than a definitive statement on any one platform. And just to be clear, I'm not standing on a soapbox championing for Pinterest, but I reckon we could probably nudge Google to get a bit smarter with its algorithms.
So, what if instead of giving domains the chop, we pushed for Google to up its game on the personalization front? Like, if I'm consistently booting Pinterest from my searches with "-pinterest", Google could take the hint and drop it down the ranks for me. Wouldn't that make more sense than completely blacklisting sites that some folks might still want to use? In the end, we all win if Google gets better at tuning into our search habits, right?
Same for youtube, a simple blacklist would make my search results much nicer, but youtube seems to push a few large media companies as hard as possible.
The usefulness of a per-user block list is not fighting outright spam. The statistical filters, etc, as applied by the search engine, work best here, as you correctly state.
The point is to remove certain well-known sites with information about well-known topics, which is unhelpful for the particular user, me. That information is technically not spam, but it's on a wrong level, badly presented, etc.
That is, if I search some info about a particular CSS trick, I want MDN be on top, some professional blogs be near top, and w3schools be on the third page. For someone else, priorities may be different, but I know what to expect for the search queries I issue, and I'd be glad if the search engine helped me.
Equally, certain domains are known to be more rich with information I happen to seek, like reddit.com, so I'd like to give them a boost. Some other people may prefer something else, or not give any boost at all.
So, this is personalization, not anti-spam. If Google kept it, it could even bring important insights into what ads I would skip and what would click :)
Maybe 90% of users would ignore this feature. But the 10% of power users maybe disproportionately important: with more disposable income, more clout on social networks, more decision-making power. I suppose that the shutdown of Google Reader, which affected a relatively small number of users, affected all the wrong people, and destroyed so much goodwill that the losses from it are many orders of magnitude larger than whatever savings from not supporting it any more.