Report a Content Violation

The other day, I was wondering to a reporter why Google didn’t explicitly “harness collective intelligence” by asking users to report search engine spam. I was pleased to see that they are doing this at least in the sketchup 3D warehouse. Each entry has a “report a policy violation” link, which takes you to a page on which you can report spam, links to adult content, trademark, copyright or patent violation, invasions of privacy, or plain mislabeling.

I’ve written before about how this kind of user interaction needs to be seen with fresh eyes. It’s not just “feedback” that goes into a tech support comment log. When properly harvested, it’s part of a trend that You Mon Tsang of Boxxet called bionic software, the real-time incorporation of human activity into a software application. Bionic software ranges from the implicit — as when user link behavior influences search results — to the explicit but easy to miss — as when user tagging generates a new form of web navigation element, the tag cloud — to the fully explicit, as with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, CastingWords, or the just Techcrunched web design site xhtmlized. (And of course, I shouldn’t forget the granddaddy in this space, Distributed Proofreaders, the correction engine of Project Gutenberg.)

But back to my starting point: I wonder why Google and other search engines don’t use this technique to make finding a hotel and other heavily spammed areas searchable again.

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