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A few month's back I ran into this site called "Digg". Of course, by now every techie knows about it. At that time, I was just amazed by the way it worked. Right away it got me thinking, these guys are onto something. Give the power to the users!
What I was reading was how this site had given users all the power to moderate and decide what is good for them. The system seemed to work, I would go to my specific categories and I would find links to articles and content that was very interesting to me.
I started digging around on digg and somewhere I read, that the model would work well for a Yahoo or AOL type site for their News section. Since the links were news related, I guess this makes sense. Use the digg method for news, it's an improvement on the popular aggregators out there.
Well here is my question; Why stop at news? Why not use the same user moderated model on search?
Relevancy is the all holy grail in search! Be relevant and they will come. The current popular search engines out there currently use technology as the basis for deciding what is relevant. I personally think this is a highly inefficient model. There has been plenty of times when looking for a solution to a problem, I run into the top 10-20 results being spammy type sites that are highly irrelevant.
Google spends all this time and effort trying to figure what sites are spammy, creating complex algorithms to filter out the irrelevant content. What about letting users vote and moderate results like digg?
Of course thinking like this, leads to many questions.
What are your thoughts . . .
Is it even realistic? By doing so, is that giving away too much power and say to the user? Can the system be manipulated? If so are there gaurds to stop such manipulation? Does a user moderated system provide more relevancy on average than a complex algorithm? What about a hybrid system? Using both user moderation and complex algorithms?
