Saturday, March 30, 2013

Things Google Should Invent: unclick that link

Google tracks click-throughs.  You can see this when you right-click on a link in search results.  Rather than the link of the target page, it gives you http://www.google.ca/url?[insert alphanumeric sequence here]. 

The problem with this is when you click on a link that looks promising, but it turns out not to be what you're looking for.  Google still counts that as a click-through, even though it's an unhelpful result.

I'd like to have the option of, when I go back to the search results to find something more useful, clicking a little checkbox next to the unhelpful link that says "This isn't what I was looking for with this search," so Google can learn from this.

They did once have a thing where you can ban certain websites from your personal search results, but that's way more drastic than what I'm thinking of.  For example, perhaps a search for "Jon Doe" "University of Toronto" turns up the Facebook page of a Jon Doe who lives in Toronto, but it isn't the Jon Doe who's a prof at U of T. That doesn't mean I never want to see search results from Facebook again.  That doesn't even mean I never want to see this particular Jon Doe again.  It just means that this is not the Jon Doe I'm looking for with those keywords. 

It's also possible that Google might be able to track when we return to the search results and select another result.  The problem is that doesn't tell them if the first thing we clicked on was unsatisfactory, or if we're just looking for further information. (If I'm researching/hiring/stalking Jon Doe, I'm not going to stop at one search result.)  Allowing us to inform Google when individual results aren't what we were looking for will clarify this ambiguity.

1 comment:

Lorraine said...

Tinyurl.com's preview feature seems to offer at least part of the functionality you describe. The equivalent could be incorporated into Google (most likely by EightHundredPoundGoogle [google being a word that means "a hundred orders of magnitude"] acquiring TinyUrl, as seems to be the nature of things) maybe with a "preview" button (right next to the "translate" button?) for each search result, or maybe like tinyurl.com itself, to preview or not to preview, that is in the user settings.