Tapanti, that seems doubtful; I am sure somebody would have noticed it by now. But even if this were true, it leaves us the same problem that seo spammers could build bots to autosurf the web, trying to give google an impression that some pages are more popular than they really are. How to beat the spammers? thomas.
Is that such a bad thing? It's not like adware - it's something that only helps you methinks. Plus anyone can log IP>
Like I said in my original post, smart spammers would just go through a distributed ip proxy network. Sure, you could then try to build a blacklist of all proxies on the planet that allow anonymous surfing, but now we are talking about serious investment of effort. I feel somehow this "data mine the users" thing is too rough. Can't someone come up with something better? thomas.
Search technology is going to be continuously improved, it just matters to google if they are the ones who come up with the major fix FIRST.
Thomas, they ARE doing it. Quoted from Google Personalized Web Search (beta) FAQ: http://labs.google.com/personalized/faq.html "... Google Personalized web search delivers custom search results that are based on a profile you create describing your interests. For example, people with an interest in the outdoors will see different relevant sites for a search on "bass" than people who are interested in music." I think that's exactly what GG pursues with this. By delivering customized results based on user profiles, spammers would have to broad their target coverage areas, making more difficult to achieve good spamming results on high-traffic search terms.
Tapanti, you wrote From your description of google personalized search, it sounds like the results would be based on filling out some forms and having an "account", not data mining your browser. Even so, I suppose if personalized search was really really good, you could somehow customize it with your own anti seo spam filters, but this helps only you, not the rest of the web. Although of course google could study your strategies, and apply them to the general results, so perhaps this isn't all that unreasonable. I suppose I should try out google personalized search if I continue much further down this train of thought. Thomas.
Thomas, they do base the personalized search results on a profile created by the user, and this of course would limit the benefit only to "subscribed" users, but they can have you "sign up" through many different services such as GG Web Alerts, GG Groups, GG Deskbar, GG Toolbar, GG Blogs, Picasa, GMail, etc. Of course they'll use this information to "improve" general results: Again quoting GG Privacy Policy: http://www.google.com/privacy.html "Google collects limited non-personally identifying information your browser makes available whenever you visit a website. This log information includes your Internet Protocol address, browser type, browser language, the date and time of your query and one or more cookies that may uniquely identify your browser. We use this information to operate, develop and improve our services."