search engine improvement
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Keywords: distributed ratings systems, search engines, spiders, spiderspace, idea futures, The Shockwave Rider, John Brunner You know there is a trick that might greatly improve the effectiveness of a search engine at almost no cost to the end user. It is the well-known heuristic of "If Person A likes X and Y, and Person B likes X, then Person B probably likes Y.", combined with passive polling (which is getting information about people's opinions just by watching their actions, instead of by asking them). A first simple implementation would keep a table of the pages that people choose, keyed from the query that they originally submitted. Those pages that people choose most frequently from the list of matching pages (and/or those pages that people "stop" on-- that they do _not_ follow by further searching), would get bumped up a little in the list. This would be massively expensive in networking, storage, and computation, giving those hi-tech Alpha clusters at AltaVista something to do... :^) There are plenty of extras and refinements that could be added (for example, put some keywords identifying your "affiliation" in a separate field. It will only consider the results from other people who entered the same affiliation keywords when weighting your search results.). And there are some good topics for further discussion, such as is it worthwhile to distinguish between "relevancy" and "value"? I don't have a comprehensive list of people who are already working on this area (distributed ratings) (if I did, I might have Cc:'ed them), but I know that many people are. I hope that they and the search engine people get together and make cool stuff soon. There is the interesting issue of whether this will cause self-reinforcing "degeneration", where people (or an "affiliation"-keyed group of people) accidentally overlook a worthy page early in the game, and then, using each other's behavior to influence their own, reinforce that mistake. As a final attribution note: John Brunner thought of this idea idea in his prophetic novel _The Shockwave Rider_ in the 75. There is a wonderful line which I can't find right now, about how it turned out to be a flywheel instead of an oracle, merely aggregating human mistakes and successes. Regards, Bryce P.S. ObCryptoRelevance: Um... you could get paid for your ratings using Chaumian ecash, and even have your ratings popped into the right "affiliation" using Chaumian credentials... P.P.S. CryptoRelevance isn't very Ob anymore, is it? Just as well, IMESHO. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2i Comment: Auto-signed under Unix with 'BAP' Easy-PGP v1.1b2 iQB1AwUBMhjA+EjbHy8sKZitAQGpIQMAyDcdHUgK9/KhNskvUG8AAbourl1Hg6J5 ZIzo7aTnDq3ZGN9RnqKRkBRRmk4hjN1rFFWvQUYtA3XQQl85scE2XVGG/oURBoTW EU4WwB2oMSsAVGkYHn02B4gFn8gO6hmA =tZn3 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
On Mon, 19 Aug 1996 bryce@digicash.com wrote: [good ideas about distributed ratings systems]
There is the interesting issue of whether this will cause self-reinforcing "degeneration", where people (or an "affiliation"-keyed group of people) accidentally overlook a worthy page early in the game, and then, using each other's behavior to influence their own, reinforce that mistake.
It probably will. But people like being degenerates. Another interesting issue for privacy is setting the granularity of the information. If you know that only a few people have visited site A, and you tell the distributing service that you like site A, then the rating service has the potential to become a way to track people (to a certain margin of error). Were I running such a service, I wouldn't hand out information until enough static had accumulated to provide anonymity. -rich
bryce@digicash.com wrote:
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Keywords: distributed ratings systems, search engines, spiders, spiderspace, idea futures, The Shockwave Rider, John Brunner
You know there is a trick that might greatly improve the effectiveness of a search engine at almost no cost to the end user. It is the well-known heuristic of "If Person A likes X and Y, and Person B likes X, then Person B probably likes Y.", combined with passive polling (which is getting information about people's opinions just by watching their actions, instead of by asking them).
Have you seen the similarities engine (http://www.ari.net/se/ise/001/WC000001.html) that tries to find similarities between bands? I can't see a reason this wouldn't work for web pages. (Films would be noce too). Gary -- pub 1024/C001D00D 1996/01/22 Gary Howland <gary@systemics.com> Key fingerprint = 0C FB 60 61 4D 3B 24 7D 1C 89 1D BE 1F EE 09 06 ^S ^A^Aoft FAT filesytem is extremely robust, ^Mrarely suffering from^T^T
The idea of sharing ratings on the web is literally as old as the web; it was part of the original idea (remember the original client was also an editor). --- Cause maybe (maybe) | In my mind I'm going to Carolina you're gonna be the one that saves me | - back in Chapel Hill May 16th. And after all | Email address remains unchanged You're my firewall - | ........First in Usenet.........
participants (4)
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bryce＠digicash.com -
Gary Howland -
Rich Graves -
Simon Spero