Looks like Google: Evil or Not? arose a bit of a buzz in the blogosphere. Thanks to everyone who linked to it (and Philipp in primis), we gathered more than 5000 votes. Keep them votes coming!
I also got some interesting suggestions towards a better implementation of the concept. Some people complained that the “0% - 100% evil” scale is confusing and I actually agree. I’m thinking of substituting the numerical values with something like “Totally good”, “Almost good”, “Indifferent”, “Almost evil”, “Totally evil”. What do you think?
TDavid asked for some editorial control on the relevance of the aggregated items. This would certainly make the website more interesting, but would require that I dedicate some time to manually filtering posts. While not much, I’m not sure I can sustain this activity in the long run. You see, Google: Evil or Not? is just a fun application that I hacked together in a couple of evenings during my year-end vacations, mostly to learn programming with Ruby on Rails. I am grateful for all the suggestions and critiques I received, but people shouldn’t expect to much out of it, unless I can find some way to monetize the traffic, a thing that I don’t foresee yet, at least in the near future.
One option might be giving user the option to filter out irrelevant items by voting them out. If a certain threshold is exceeded, the item goes automatically in the trash bin. Shouldn’t be too hard to implement. I’ll have to think about it.
It feels like votes are being cast on only half a scale, I know it’s “Evil or not” and not “Good or Evil” but it still feels strange that there’s so many choices for evil, and only 0% for saying it’s good, or not evil. Most simply you could have just two options, Evil and Not Evil, but I agree at least changing the names could help.
Monetizing the traffic? Use Google Adsense