Slashdot Mirror

I find it horrifying that you think that EVERY nation should have a democractic say in the administration of the internet -- including countries that already, today, censor the internet for the 'good of their citizens'.

You mean like how the USA passed a law that forced Google to remove links to anti-Scientology websites? How like how USA courts forced 2600 to stop linking to a website that had code that allowed people to watch their own DVDs?

What's the matter with letting China et al have a say, anyway? You seem to be equating "can voice an opinion and has a vote in how things are run" with "can take control whenever they want". That's ludicrous.

Or by "control" are you talking about the fact that it's being managed by a group who make logistical decisions that I could care less about

Why on earth should what you care about be a factor in this?

And it's couldn't care less. You sound like a fucking idiot when you get it wrong.

What the big media sites should be worried about is the influence of blogs on Google ratings. If people are put out by having to register for sites like NYTimes, bloggers will link to open access sites. This will cause a drop in NYTimes' Google score, and that'll cost them advertising money.

see How Weblogs Influence A Billion Google Searches A Week

No kidding. Because any critical sites to buy AdWords. (Regardless of claimed trademark violations.)

...Google bombing.

I've heard this called "Money Bombing" see this Link . Apparently a bunch of spammers cross link each others pages trying to get higher rankings. I am sure they (Google) can weed this out. Just like they weeded out the Litigous Bastards (SCO) Google bomb after a few days.

Once you've published something on the internet, it's very hard to remove it. There are too many 'bots beavering away in the background. If I do a search for my name on google, I get info going all the way back to my post-grad days at college some 12 years ago....

I feel your assumption is wrong. It would be foolish to assume that the eigenvectors and eigenvalues they derive from one Pagerank will generally hold in a space as dynamic as the worldwide web. Sure, slashdot.org will probably maintain the same sort of authority and hub value... but what as terms change? A flurry of "blog" articles one month may make /. an authority... but what when the infatuation ends?

We have already seen the effects of Google-bombing and Google-washing. The strength of Page Rank is that is objective in terms of the current state of the WWW. It makes no assumptions about the shape of the data. As a term takes on new meaning (see "second superpower") Page Rank stays cocurrent temporally. A new definition may bubble up to the top for a term for a month but then disappear as the linkage structure of the web phases it out (i.e. blogs talk about it less, less interconnectivity, less appearance at "hub" nodes).

Numerically, PageRank is a recursive search for eigenvalues and vectors like updating a Markov Chain. It is a nice application of linear algebra. Because it is a matrix operation, it is highly parallelizable. Also there are many redundant calculation and ordering speedups one can do for matrix multiplications (as anyone who as taken a CS algorithms course knows).

But to assume a stability from one calculation to the next could lead, over time, to the very inaccuracies Google was built to overcome. There is a lot of research in mining web data. There have been several academic improvements to it along with improvements to related algorithms such as Kleinbergs and LSI. It is well within reason that these were just applied to the Google app.

If you search google with "google: v", the first result is info about Google's struggle with the church of Scientology:

Church v. Google - How the Church of Scientology is forcing ...

Just thought it was interesting that what comes around goes around...

An online Starcraft RPG? Only at

Ah ha! Finally, a solution for the Google Time Bomb! Google would be able to filter out 85% of the blogs and show us the real (read: unblogged) results.

Meta tags are used a lot... there's widespread knowledge of so-called "google bombing".. Google pops up some of its search results based on the content between an A HREF tag, as you can read about here: Google Bomb...

Much like security, I think this is the kind of thing that hackers and tinkerers will always find a way to exploit. The question is who can stay ahead in the race?

Seems to me that if even supposedly technically aware people are making the mistakes such as the poster's above, what chance does the average Joe have of understanding the erosion of rights?

Google Bombing has been effective in the past at putting the "real" word out using mob jusice, so why can't we combat the digital cancer of DRM in the same way? Having a government control technical advances is not too far removed from socialist oppresion, and we can see how that helped Russia become the tech powerhouse it is today. This really is the government's/corporation's (they are effectively the same thing in the US) best chance to control your lives and turn you into a statistical resource more than ever. You think DRM is just about "protecting content"? What about the enormous amount of marketting information companies will be able to gather by a few SQL queries matching the "thieving_customers" table with "address" and "purchases". It's a goldmine for the scum pushing junkmail into your lives.

Yes, it still happens a lot... there's widespread knowledge of so-called "google bombing".. Google pops up some of its search results based on the content between an A HREF tag, as you can read about here: Google Time Bomb...

Much like security, I think this is the kind of thing that hackers and tinkerers will always find a way to exploit. The question is who can stay ahead in the race?

From the article "Google Loves Blogs": "Google weights fresh votes more than older votes... fresh links are more heavily weighted". If that's true, the links from pro-scientology sites like whatisscientology and exactscientology might have lost voting power when they stopped being new. Conversely, linking to xenu.net from your site might only help temporarily.

You don't know of enough tech sites to claim that "almost every tech site" banded together on something. No one does.