A week or so ago, Google introduced it’s answer to the Facebook “Like”. It is called “+1″. Here is a quote from the official announcement:
The +1 button is shorthand for “this is pretty cool” or “you should check this out.” Click +1 to publicly give something your stamp of approval. Your +1′s can help friends, contacts, and others on the web find the best stuff when they search.
A discussion then ensued on Twitter about whether Google had finally introduced explicit relevance feedback to its system. For a long time, the user has been able to give implicit signals of preference to the search engine algorithm in the form of click-throughs. And conventional wisdom has held that users are too lazy or to disinterested to interact with a web search engine in any explicit manner beyond typing 2.7 keywords into the one-line search box. But now Google has introduced the +1. Does this mean that explicit relevance feedback is finally here?
My answer is no. And it is important to understand why.
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