i see this as google embracing the functionality that has been available via addons to various browsers, voting up or down on search results. as far as ads, IMHO, in their current form, they are a dinosaur gasping for air, trying to survive in an environment where your typical joe-schmo, when asked how often he clicks ads on purpose, will say almost never. companies are scared to death by this reality. technology exists (and is becoming more & more user-friendly, appealing less exclusively to niche geek crowds and more to regular folks), to block these ads quite easily on the web, skip them on the TV, & of course on the radio, many just change the channel. yet companies are still throwing wads of cash at every new advertising scheme or gimmick they can find, with minimal success. speaking from both that geek niche & the regular folks crowd, i can honestly say in my own recent memories i can maybe recall purposefully clicking an ad maybe once. of course i block all ads in my firefox browser. i don't see the targeted spam-type ads that google places on the right side of search & disable google click tracking anyway… just my 2¢ anyway…

FYI: many of the links in this article are misdirected to an irrelevant post.

Please delete this comment.

“Google +1 seriously begs the question as to why Google isn’t simply ranking results based on what people are clicking on”. A couple reasons why google may be recalcitrant to rank webpages based on what anonymous users click. 1. This system would be very easy to game by having botnets click on websites. While you could probably make a botnet that forms google accounts, links them together to form a social graph and then clicks on links the results will only polute the search results of users with in that social graph (ie other botnet profiles). To get the poluted search results to affect real people the botnet would have to go one step further and trick people into adding botnet profiles to there list of google friends. 2. Aggregating all the hits from anonymous searchers would result in even more homogeny of search results and would potentially be a suboptimal solution compared to aggregating hits in into separate groups based off of a social graph. 3. It is difficult sometimes to tell a shitty website from a good website based on the two or three lines of text in a google search result. Because of this you often have to actually hit the link to see if it is good or not. +1 solves this problem because adding a link as good is an explicit and conscious action.

It was years ago that Google started to betray the uber nerdy, no frills oriented info hungry techy. Of course, having already earned their trust, the larger pedestrian internet audience had already followed their lead and used Google as well. Now, as if the competition, controversy and cost (and complexity of offering fair search results in the face of an army of hackers hellbent on cheating whatever system it is) aren't enough to destroy the original Google experience, sorting site results by user experience will certainly help, for me at least in one aspect of my search experience. If experience is any guide, flashy multimedia sites will be ranked by the masses, and sites with easy to believe and easy to be mad about news articles .. .. spammy, virus bearing sites may even be ranked down (if we are lucky and the users have actually gotten smarter since 2000), but the purely technical mailing list archives style search results will probably get buried, and I will find new search tools. ./linux for now .. probably never bing.My real prediction, searching the internet with a search engine as a non-technical user will be completely replaced by user supplied urls in social networking circles, including things like Angieslist .. and then this kind of thing http://www.newscientist.com/ar… .. will guide our dissatisfaction.

haha – i dont even see any flash junk unless i willingly left-click and ask it to appear… its very helpful in x64 systems that choke on flash. if you're using chrome – click “wrench”, “Preferences”, “Under the Hood”, “Content Settings”, then under “Plug-ins” select “Block All”. have a nice day.

Thanks for the comment. #1 – google already has a lot of tech to protect against bots on the ads next to the search results, can use the same tech for the results themselves. #2 – people are rarely going to see likes from their friends, so the aggregate numbers are going to be much more relevant. #3 – it would need to detect if people are coming back to the search results after clicking on a link and clicking on something else, indicating that it was not a good link.

Hey Peter, your comment about why Google isn't just ranking the ones that people click on was something I wondered too. I'm sure Google's ultimate decision was because you'll have black hat spammers purchase IP scrambling software and even go as far as logging in via a VPN and do their search, click on their listing and then stay on that site for some time.Yea, I'm extremely curious to see how this is going to affect the rankings. Time to start testing!

Popped over here from Google reader to mention the same thing Karl did in his first point. A couple of big reasons why ranking according to clicks won't work:1. As Karl mentioned, and I agree, ranking based on clicks is easily gamed. Consider this: The specifics of Google's search algorithms are kept secret; any updates to the algorithm are not widely published. Even with all of this secrecy, SEM are incredibly adept at gaming the system. Imagine if Google adopted (as opposed to their complex algorithms) something as straightforward as: “If you click on this link and not any others, we'll raise it in the rankings”.2. There's an inherent flaw in this 'click to increase ranking' system. What ends up happening is that the top content gets stuck in an positive feedback loop, while everything else gets ignored. The top links are (obviously) more likely to get clicks than the lower links. So, since they're getting more clicks, their rankings go up even more. This leads to a highly polarized data set in which the top spots are likely to never relenquish their popularity grip. New content and new websites have essentially no way to break into the first page of Google, which from a SEO perspective is all that really matters. (Of course, there are ways to mitigate this effect, but the point that I'm making is that this approach is inherently flawed.)3. Perhaps a bit of an anecdotal approach, here, but Google has had a considerable portion of the world's top engineering talent for years, and search is (arguably) their most important app. Ranking based on clicks is one of the most naive approaches to ranking content. If this were an effective way to rank content, don't you think the top engineering minds working on an industry leader's biggest moneymaker would have added this 1, 5, or 10 years ago?

This is why we can't have anything nice. Fascinating comments on Google +1