The Problem With Google +1
Wednesday, March 30, 2011 at 9:14PM Google have just announced +1, a new addition to Search that aims to "get you the most relevant results as quickly as possible." It seems all well and good, and the concept of using user recommendations to improve search results is something that really needs to be in Google Search, but it has one fundamental flaw.
How many times - when you're searching and come across something actually useful to your query - do you return to the list of search results? I only ever return to the listings page if I find the link unhelpful or irrelavent. Maybe Google should look at a system of negative feedback instead?
I'm not saying that this isn't a necessary system, far from it. I honestly believe that user recommendations are one of the best ways of conveying relevance. But I also think that Google should be putting more weight on social sharing; manually sharing a post is without a doubt the best way of stating "this is relevant to me in some way". I'm hoping that Google are doing a lot with tweets; parsing hashtags and keyword searching content to gain some kind of link context (and thus improve specific queries).
Now, if Google were to introduce a +1 into my entire web experience - through add-ons for the major browsers, or even a Google-backed proxy that injected the +1 button into the site I was viewing - I would be a lot happier and certainly click on it more. Until it's there, on the content with me, I just can't see myself using this.
Reader Comments (4)
Of course, they could implement a horrid frame overlay thing, like with image searches. I hope not.
I'm not sure I agree with you. Maybe a negative feedback system in addition to a positive feedback system would be workable, but having a purely negative system is flawed. Imagine trying to buy products from Amazon reviews based solely on negative reviews? It'd mean that a new product with no reviews yet is seen as higher than one with, say, 10 poor reviews but 1000 good reviews that nobody has been able to express. It "punishes" anything that's not pretty much universally tolerable.
@Sam Okay, you've made a good point, a solely negative based system wouldn't work. Still, I don't believe that +1 will get enough usage for it to be truly useful. I'm sure that given time they'll figure it out, but it's got to be something incredibly easy to do; not something that makes me leave the content I've just found and want to bookmark/use.
@Jamie – Yeah, I agree with your principle that you're unlikely to go back to the Google listings, and that's an issue. Maybe if they give their users incentives to do it, like with StumbleUpon... "+1 websites you find useful, and we'll hook you up with websites that others similar to you have +1'd" it would encourage users to give regular, honest feedback.