Whitelist, Blacklist, Stars Gone, Blocklist

Over the past week has come news of Bing and Google using whitelists, speculations of blacklists, Google's announcement of site blocking by signed in users, and the disappearance of the bookmarking stars which replaced SearchWiki. Just to confuse matters further, depending on which Google version you use, browser version, and apparently the toss of the dice, you may or may not be able to even see some of these changes.

So I'll try to summarize my understanding. First, Danny reports that at the SMX West conference last week, "both Google and Bing said they have "exception lists" for sites that might get hit by some algorithm signals." In other words, some of the spam identification algorithms that find and demote lots of sites in the rankings may also demote sites that were not supposed to have gotten hit. Those sites get put in the whitelist for that particular algorithm. An article from The Register claims that this contradicts statements from Google in certain lawsuits and continues with examples of similar actions that look like site blacklisting.

Most searchers can hope that the blacklisting and whitelisting improves search results and removes irrelevant hits, but if we don't know what has been listed, it is hard to determine how true that is. On the same day, Google announced a new ability for logged-in searchers to block results from specific domains. Don't like see so many eHow results? Just block them all. Or so the the theory goes. Not only must you be logged in to a Google account to have the option, but you have to use Google.com in English with the right browser. According to the announcement on 3/10/11, "The new feature is rolling out today and tomorrow on google.com in English for people using Chrome 9+, IE8+ and Firefox 3.5+, and we'll be expanding to new regions, languages and browsers soon."

Maybe. Karen has some screenshots in her post from a few days later, but I have been trying since the announcement, using the right Google in the right language with several supported browsers and different accounts. Here in Montana, I still can't see it almost a week later. I've turned Instant on and off. I've tried from home and on campus. Still no luck. Comments on Karen's post also note both that others can't see it and that it may go away. On top of that, the stars have been turned off that allowed signed in users to star (bookmark) certain results so that they'd come back at the top of results pages later. The bookmarked pages remain bookmarked, but for now at least, the ability to star new ones has vanished. Or as Barry puts it, you "You Can Hate (Block) But No Longer Love (Star) Google's Search Results." For me, that means I can now neither star or block results.