How to Build the World's Most Accurate Search Engine Results?

Do you often look at the Google search results and find yourself a little dismayed by the latest spam site that falls into the top 10 for a keyword in your niche?

It happens to us all. We wonder how the world's leading search engine could fail to cleanse their results of such garbage content. Even though they have to process billions of pages with their network grid, shouldn't the annihilation of spam be such a fundamental concern that the team of top Google scientists would have figured it out by now?

Shouldn't situations like the "Chaos of the Big Daddy Update" ONLY be a type of end-of-days prognostication by those who enjoy stories of Armageddon and conspiracy theories? And certainly not a REALITY...

Unfortunately Google Search is not yet where it needs to be.

So here is the million dollar question. If you were Google's top dog in Search R&D... and you wanted to build the most relevant search engine results in the world... what would you do?

(Would it be Google Co-op?)

Let the games begin.

For instance the support is bad. I've noticed that several times. Questions and reports about spam sites are mostly ignored. I think they need to realize one can't automate everything using filters etc. You need real human support, a team where everyday users can report abuse. Less focus on new products, making more money etc, more focus on quality and people.

I think that the volume of requests which such a huge global user base makes it almost impossible for them to provide support at such a level. However, I am in favor of a statistical model that does, in fact, automate the process of banning and/or de-valuing a page within the SERPs based upon a high volume of user reports of spam, etc.

FYI I would integrate such a feature directly within the Google toolbar.

Well atleast something in that direction. I don't like the fact that a group of users can actually have such a great influence on 1 website, have to be carefull you don't end up with "DoS" attacks for fake spam reports. But like you said it's very hard to control such a huge user base. However, I agree the already popular toolbar may be the key to get more input from users though.

Yes, it would have to be something that chooses the sample space for influence very carefully. One potential consideration is having Google Toolbar history - meaning that the toolbar generally monitors surfing activity to give a user a score. Users with sufficient score may have their spam reports taken into account, while others might be ignored.

Before actually banning a site/page a secondary Google "Spambot" could crawl the site, running advanced analysis to search for spam or blackhat techniques.

The spam reports could be combined with data on "average length of visit" per page.

Therefore, a page that has a strong indication of spam based on reports combined with a short length of stay could be flagged. Even if the page was incorrectly labelled as spam, the short length of stay indicates that it is probably not a great result for a given keyword search phrase and therefore should be devaluated in the SERPS (for that phrase at a minimum).

I think google is only commercial.It is a great search engine but we cannot even email them for non adsense or adwords support.No reindex option possible.But in Yahoo you cannot even submit sitemap only feed

googles support for adsense and adwords is outstanding, but your right, some of their other support topics are a bit slow.. Google is a great thing, they are so much more then a search engine, or I should say that have so many other apps.

btw, the thread is about spam and google just released some info about them stopping the "google bomb" so they are in the right direction as far as that goes.

has anyone got Google co-op to work? I can't seem to it to recognize my forum feeds. :(

Thank you, I really like it...