[geuis]

Your comment doesn't even make sense.

Look, take a few minutes and watch this. http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bu...

When a site gets blocked by Google, it doesn't disappear from the internet but all of a sudden it disappears to hundreds of millions of people. Poof. Gone.

If a site gets ranked lower, then it won't get as much traffic but at least its still findable. Even spammy sites deserve a chance to turn their shit around (although it almost never happens).

If I want to block a site for just me, fine. There's browser extensions that do that. However, when Google or Bing or DuckDuckGo lets you do it and then uses that data in ranking sites for other people there's a Big Filter Problem.

Or alternatively, there's a Big Fucking Problem.

[joebadmo]

Ranking something lower, especially if it gets knocked off the first page, has the same effect in kind, if not degree, as blocking.

I'm not sure which part of this you think contributes to the filter bubble effect (which I'm skeptical about in the first place). If I block a site, it's because I don't want to see results from it, and I was never going to visit it anyway.

How is using blocking data as part of the algorithm any bigger a filter problem than any other part of the algorithm? Google uses many, many search signals and this is just one of them. And I imagine a pretty good one.