This may exist in some form or another in the 'link', and page rank stragedy from google. But is there a website rating system.

For example on video services like YouTube, and now GoogleVideo you can rate a video, and leave a comment. This obviously helps rank the video along with the hits it gets!

Could this be a possibility with whole websites for Google to improve 'searchability'! So you could have 'Content Rating'.

It may cause ratings fraud with people rating their own websites, but Google already has to cope with this with adsense.

Would it work?

No. Things like that are way too easy to manipulate, no matter how Google tries to stop it.

For example, I have remote access to three networks in the Greater Toronto Area from this location. I could easily go into any one of them, login, and "vote" with them. If I can do that and have a legitimate reason to access those three networks (which I do...I administer them remotely for clients), then imagine what a blackhat would do.

Adding a sort by rating would rock. It's only a matter of time before they add it.

It would throw SEPS into chaos.
Google have already made the mistake of partially handing ranking over to others with thier stupid PR, to base SERPS on votes would not work at all.

It's googles job to decide if sites are good or not, Not ours.

I agree it's not something that search engines should be invloved in. Like Adam said it would be far too easy to manipulate ans as stOx pointed out look at what has happned with PR.

And why should we think a search engine should determine some kind of rating. Who would be rating the site? And what qualifications would determine which site is better? A site I think best someone else might think is a horrible site. So much of it depends on what a particular person is looking for.

The goal of a search engine should be to provide the most relevant pages to a given query. Not something easily achieved, but all the major search engines do a pretty good job considering what's involved.

Ratings are best left to social bookmarking kind of sites. Unless I can get some information about the person doing the rating the rating is useless to me.

Yes what you say is true, but the fact is that many casual users would like some kind of a rating system. If there was a credible way to rank a system, maybe by having your own section of the company do it. Many websites are pretty useless or maybe they are not credible for what they are doing it in. It would be much easier if there was a rank that could tell someone if it is credible sources or just a 14 year old child typing something.

Yes what you say is true, but the fact is that many casual users would like some kind of a rating system.

Based on what? This is the first time i have heard anyone suggest the idea so i would say casual users couldn't care less. They want relevant results, Not a myspace style love-in.

Google does a fairly good job at delivering relevant quality results for a search term, So having a "vote system" would not only go no way towards improving search results but would be so open to abuse it would kill google over night.

Any kind of rating system will be subjective though and that's why it's best left to things other than search engines. I really don't want a search engine determing which site is better than another for my query. I'd prefer to decide that. All I want from them is to objectively display as best they can the most relevant sites to my query.

Who's to say that 14 year old doesn't have something I want to read.

It could be argued that the way they determine relavancy is a sort of rating system, but beyond that I really don't want it. And there's really no way they could do it objectively. And I agree with st0x that it would kill search engines. The day they present a rating system to tell me which site is better is the day I stop using them.