Google is tweaking their search engine, again.
Remember, Google started as a search engine. Amazing, right?
It’s nice to see them giving their search engine more attention, it will at least keep the Bing builders busy.
Google’s new tweak is aimed at personalizing your search results. Giving you the power to filter out specific domains from all your search requests.
You will see in the next few days (for those using Google in English and using Chrome 9+, IE8+ and Firefox 3.5+), another option beside “Cached” and “Similar”. It will be, “Block all ‘example.com’ results”.
This option will be available whether you’re logged into your Google Account or not. Although, to confirm that you want to block a specific domain, you have to be logged in, since blocked domains are assciated with your Google Account.
Now that you’ve confirmed blocking the specific domain from your search results, Google will notify you as to what domains were blocked from your search results
I like that Google isn’t hiding anything, here. It’s not like you block a site and that’s the end of it. Plus, you can go and manage the domains you’ve blocked. Good stuff.
I really like this. It’s an excellent feature. This kind of stuff brings search results to a whole new level. A customization that’s personal.
This is the part that worries me:
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.
People are mean. Everybody lies. I could see this leading down a bad road, if they give too much weight to what domains are being blocked as “offensive” or “low quality”.
[via Google Blog]
Dustin W. Stout says
I totally agree. I can see this being abused by anyone who considers Christianity (or any other religion) offensive. It’s great that they’re working on improving the search engine, but I don’t think everybody should have the power to hurt a site’s search ranking just because they don’t like the site.
Eric Dye says
Perhaps that’s why they’re holding back on putting it in place.