Bad Google Search Results

Don't you hate it when you enter a search term into Google and it comes up with what looks like a promising link and when you follow that link it turns out to be a spam site just packed with the keywords that you're looking for and a bunch of adverts and no content at all. I'm ranting about that now because I seem to have just been hitting spam sites while searching this morning.

Anyway I have an excellent idea for Google if they're listening. (In fact I think that I emailed this idea to them a while back but never heard from them so I'll mail them again.)

If you use Google's Toolbar then two of the buttons that you can optionally activate on the toolbar are the smiley face and unhappy face (aka vote for and vote against this page) - last I checked, Google didn't actually do anything with this info but it's still a nice feeling to be able to click on these buttons to vote for and against a page.

What I would like to see is an "exclude page/site from further search results" button. This would locally store a list of sites that you don't want research results for and exclude them from further searches so you don't end up at that spam site again in a few weeks time. This information could optionally also be transmitted to Google. That way if Google saw tons of people excluding the same site from results they could investigate and if it was indeed a spam site they could exclude it from the search engine.

The down side to this is that I might exclude sites that have similar key words but are not in my area of interest. For example, if I was researched tick size in the financial markets and my results started showing sites about the insect (i.e. the tick that lives on the blood of animals) then I might exclude those sites although they wouldn't be spam sites.

However I'd hope that those types of exclusions would be lower and therefore not have high exclusion rates like the spam sites.

END OF RANT

I'm feeling better now.