Google denies 'freeze' on manual search controls

Great!

Now all I need to know is: who does the manual controlling, and how much does he want?

OT: I'm not happy with the new icons; I would have preffered a more radical revision. I'm still unsure why anyone would want to use this icon, for example.

calicANUS

Calicanis is an anus of the highest calibre; forgive me El Reg for using such language.

He used to be on TWiT podcasts (before he stole the idea thisweekin.com and to irritate Laporte) and he was so irritating. He talks shit, making him the very definition of an anus.

lawsuits

@well - I think it's the other way around.

If they have NO manual controls they can say - well the computer does it all, if the nasty spammers are clever enough to get around the algorithms what can we do?

Whereas if they do any filtering at all - a court (at least a particularly stupid one) could claim that they are subject to the same editorial standards as a newspaper and are liable for everything in their searches since it is published by them.

link mafia

How to tell the good guys from a mafia who vote up each others sites ? Whatever automated means it is possible to use to detect such Mafia behaviour, the Mafia have an interest in reverse engineering and evading, to the point where mathematically, the part of the graph containing Mafia nodes is indistinguishable from the honest part, other than to the extent both parts have better internal links than links to the other part.

From that point onwards, Google have the choice of knowing and identifying their enemy or surrendering their business.

I'd be happy...

...if google would stop automatically substituting search term I enter with similarly-spelled, but unrelated words. My searches are geared to finding a small number of relevant results. If I wanted to receive 3,000,000,000 results per search I'd go back to using infoseek. This seems to a a fairly recent phenomenon, and tricks such as using quotes around things doesn't seem to defeat it.