<story><title>Google: Hide sites to find more of what you want</title><url>http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/hide-sites-to-find-more-of-what-you.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>Ah, good to see Google following our lead :-) (Disclaimer I work at Blekko and we&apos;ve had this feature from launch, and we don&apos;t limit you to 500 sites either)&lt;p&gt;On a more serious note though, its nice to see Google validate our assertion, that un-modified Google search results are getting poorer and poorer. Not that they would actually say it directly like that of course. Now lets see if they are willing to drop over a million crappy sites out of their index ...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>FWIW, in my experience one of the more difficult aspects of starting and growing a company is knowing if what you believe is true, or just something you want to be true.&lt;p&gt;So you go to start a company and you say that you believe the search experience is getting worse and worse. That you believe the leader in the market place is fighting a losing battle of trying to algorithmically determine relevance in a world where humans will actively work to subvert the algorithms. That the world would be a better place if a more customizable search experience existed.&lt;p&gt;A common response is &quot;Well if this is such an important idea they would already be doing it.&quot;&lt;p&gt;So as an entrepreneur you deal with the naysayers and you build something which other people have &quot;... been clamoring for a blacklist for years&quot; and yet has never materialized. And you put it out into the market.&lt;p&gt;Right up until you deliver your product, nobody knows who is &apos;right&apos; in this back and forth. It is all academic. You&apos;ve built the best product you know how to build, you offer it up to the world, and when you ship the debate stops being academic and starts becoming empirical.&lt;p&gt;When the market leader adds features that mimic ones you&apos;ve launched with several months ago, it can be simply timing (they may have been going to do it all along and it just happens that they did it now), it can be a response, it can be random I suppose. Regardless of why they did it, it seems to be an unequivocal damnation of pure algorithmic search.&lt;p&gt;As one of Blekko&apos;s founding concepts was that the search experience can be made better by human curation, I choose to interpret it as validation. Not that I expect Google to join in and adopt the &quot;web search bill of rights&quot; anytime soon of course.</text></comment>
<story><title>Google: Hide sites to find more of what you want</title><url>http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/hide-sites-to-find-more-of-what-you.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>Ah, good to see Google following our lead :-) (Disclaimer I work at Blekko and we&apos;ve had this feature from launch, and we don&apos;t limit you to 500 sites either)&lt;p&gt;On a more serious note though, its nice to see Google validate our assertion, that un-modified Google search results are getting poorer and poorer. Not that they would actually say it directly like that of course. Now lets see if they are willing to drop over a million crappy sites out of their index ...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rsoto</author><text>I just lost a little of respect from you guys with this comment.</text></comment>