AfterVote Marries Meta Search to Customization - Voting and Other Manipulation
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On the far right of each result you’ll see a green circle and a red circle. The green circle has a plus in it and the red circle has a minus in it, for positive and negative actions respectively. Click on each circle, and you’ll find out they’re for more than just voting.
For negative actions, you can cast a negative vote, blacklist the domain, or blacklist that one link. More precisely, you could do these things if they were all active; negative voting, at least, was not active when I tried it. I couldn’t resist blacklisting Wikipedia’s SEO link then reloading to see what would happen.
The reload was slow; certainly the comments I’ve seen about AfterVote being a little on the slow side have some merit, though it’s worth remembering that it’s searching three search engines, not just one. The link was gone from my search, but AfterVote did show me the sentence “Blacklisted result from en.wikipedia.org – Click here to view” where the link would have been. That’s probably because I had “show blacklist results” as my preference (it’s the default) under my “Blacklist/Whitelist Editing” results setting. I had the option of managing my blacklisted results such that they showed up again, which I did. The only option I could click reset all my blacklisted results; I don’t know what it would have done if I had bunch of results that were blacklisted and wanted to take only some of them off the blacklist.
For positive actions, you could cast a positive vote, whitelist the site, or bookmark the link. If you cast a positive vote, you don’t get any feedback that anything happened except for the box disappearing; no “thank you for your vote” or anything like that. The “bookmark the link” option is pretty cool; click on that and it literally brings up your favorites to add the link. It’s a nice touch, even if I wouldn’t think that someone would bookmark a site until they actually visited it (in which case you can just use the standard bookmark button in your browser). I have no way to know this, but I do wonder if AfterVote counts bookmarking a site as a vote for the site.
Next: Tricking AfterVote and Final Thoughts >>
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