Yoople, A Search Experiment in People Power - Room for Abuse?
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Danny Sullivan correctly points out that any site trying to move themselves to the top of the results by brute force manipulation must have earned at least some basic ranking in Yahoo, or else there isn't anything to drag and drop. Even there, it takes a lot of work. Using a search term other than "pizza," I tried to move one particular result one place up the rankings. Moving it up one rank 13 times by performing the drag and drop and then reloading the search didn't do it - and the result I was trying to get past had only been moved six times. Hardly any of the other results on the first page had been moved at all (then again, the search was for a highly competitive term).
This doesn't mean the system can't be abused, however. Another reviewer of Yoople commented that there's nothing in place to verify that the results are being moved by humans. Doing something to make visitors verify that they're human would be more of a pain than it's worth - can you imagine having to go through a captcha before every move you make? Even if there was a way to verify it without being really annoying, there's nothing to detect intention - or prevent some business from paying a bunch of people to move their rival's site (or perhaps a "thiscompanysucks" site) so far down in the results that searchers won't find it.
For a tiny little search experiment like Yoople, that may not matter much; I can't see very many people using Yoople as it stands now, especially with Google as the dominant search engine. But that could change. Even assuming it doesn't, the idea of this kind of collaborative search isn't going away. If and when larger search engines consider adopting something like this to improve the relevance of their search results, the bugs will need to be worked out way in advance. It's the kind of thing that is hard to resist playing with, especially if you own a site that ranks (and you wish would rank higher).
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