Updates to user collaboration and reranking your swicki search results page
November 8, 2006
We're changing the way your users interact with your swicki search results. Eariler this year, we launched tools that allowed end users to send the moderator requests to promote or demote any listing in the results. The response confirmed what we believed: user contribution is extremely valuable - for the publisher, the community and the contributor. We also realized that the interface was still too complex and confusing. So, today, after design iterations and usability testing, we are updating that interface and algorithm.
Background
Your swicki has always watched the natural click pattern of your users to rerank the results on a results page - a 'valid' click counts as an implicit vote of relevance for that result. (We filter out 'suspicious' clicks and click behavior patterns that indicate a user didn't find anything useful on that site). More popular results show up higher on the results for that search term in your swicki.
Swicki owners have always had tools that allow them to promote particular listing to the top of the results list, push entire sites to the top of all results or block results or sites. In April 2006, we gave users access to this 4-feature toolset, placing their promote and demote site suggestions in a queue for the moderator to review and approve.
What's new in this release
- More prominent call to vote: we moved the action buttons from the right column to the left, spiffed up and colorized the icons, and clarified the call to action
- Simplified voting interface: reduced the choices to two - a result is relevant or irrelevant
- Tallying the votes: an explicit vote now goes into the same bucket as implicit votes with a slightly different weighting, instead of a queue for the moderator to approve
- Keeping score: we show how many relevant clicks or votes a result has received for each search
- Moderator override: moderators can still override the community activity and 'peg' results at the top of the page using the moderator tools
Why this is cool
- Visible community collaboration: you can see how many people found a particular result relevant for a search term, from their clickpattern and their explicit votes
- Much easier to vote: one click
- Now requires sign in: to alleviate voter fraud
- Users have an instantaneous effect: no approval from the moderator required