[Search-l] Mechanism for Feedback on Search Results, was Re: Wikia Searching

[Fred Bauder]

> First off, I'm terrible at using these mailing systems, they confuse me
> and therefor I hate them. Anyway, I'm glad Wikia Search has been
> founded. I had an idea just like this (wikipedia-like search engine),
> and was thinking of programming it. Instead, I just found this I would
> like to add input (my own ideas) to be considered. I thought I'd share
> some of my original ideas, instead of let them go to waste:
>
> + Have a link that you want to have spidered? Do you consider something
> to be spam? Flag something for the adult section? And so on.
> + Discussion pages will be available to discuss this stuff, such as if
> the site has adult images and should be flagged.
> + Link website to a wikipedia entry if one exists.
> + Search .mp3's, etc,.
>
> Good luck.
> - Chris

Chris's ideas seem to assume we would have a way of generating user
feedback regarding individual search results. This could be the search
namespace (policy pages there would be moved to a new policy namespace).
Each search which produced a hit from a url would automatically generate
an entry on the search page for that url which would consist of the page
which constituted the hit and what search term was used. To give an
example, if I search for "Kiss" + "band" the top hit today on Google is
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiss_(band) So on page Search:en.wikipedia.en
an entry would be made: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiss_(band) Hit #1
"kiss" + "band". This page would be editable allowing feedback by users
regarding the utility and appropriateness of that result. In addition to
verbal comments the result could be rated from -5 to -5, feedback which
would affect subsequent search results. Situations like dead links or
redirects to porn sites would could also be reported by clicking on nix
link which would then cause the result to not be displayed. In the case of
popular sites, the page would be automatically cleared as often as needed,
or perhaps archived.

Obviously we could generate more pages and entries in this manner than we
would want. Perhaps only searches by signed in users would result in
generation of these pages. However any user of the service, signed in or
not could view such pages after a search and give feedback on the existing
content.

Fred