Slashdot Mirror
Interesting Concepts in Search Engines
TheMatt writes "A new type of search algorithm is described at NSU. In a way, it is the next generation over Google. It works off the principle that most web pages link to pages that concern the same topic, forming communities of pages. Thus, for academics, this would be great as the engine could find the community of pages related to a certain subject. The article also points out this would be good as an actually useful content filter, compared to today's text-based ones."
Is this new stuff ? Doesn't google already doing this and more ?
this was suggested a month ago when google announced the contest... looks like someone over there reads /.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
Where would Slashdot fit in to this? There's links to everywhere!
And for intelligence services, a great way to more quickly compile open source intelligence.
The idea of it being used as a content filter is interesting. Presumably, you would only be able to get to pages that were part of the 'community' of that information. Of course, there will be problems with this too, but it may end up being better than just content filtering by text strings.
The (Hopefully) Great Slashdot Blackout Apr 21-27
how Google works now?
This seems pretty cool. The interesting part is that it mimics how people surf anyway. When you find a link from a search engine now, what's your usual routine? Go to the page, look around, find another interesting link, go to that page, maybe go back one and link away again... So this can pre-define that 'island' that you would have manually browsed anyway, but hopefully with better results.
Jason
wow, now search engines can reutrn webrings........how not revolutionary is that?
;)
stupid timelimit on posts crap....no way I'm going to get fp now
So...the engine crawls through, looking at links, goes to those sites, and looks at more links. So on and so on, until it has a web of links defined. The problem with this approach is that they have to have a VALID starting point OR a valid ending point in order for this method to be of use. In other words, either they have to manually start from a good site for physics, such as Stephen Hawking's homepage, or wind up at a good site for physics, such as oh, Stephen Hawking's website, in order to determine what's a good physics site. In the end, the content still has to be managed, or a porn site manager can still get around all this by linking to all kinds of sites, rather than stuffing their text/metatags. In the end, this solves nothing.
...the poor bastard that searches for pr0n on this search engine. Holy Jesus, can you imagine the links?!?
Knowing google, they're probably already working on such a thing. Also, I question how well it would work, I'm not saying it doesn't, as they've already shown it to work, but completely ignoring the website's text is like taking two steps forward and three steps back. Wouldn't the ideal search engine combine the best of both worlds? Checking text and links?
I get the feeling that there's much more to be done with link analysis. If you think about it, it's very similar to Sociology. There's elements of population and community as well as migration and economics. Do you think Tim Berners Lee could have imagined what he was letting the world in for back in 1990.
Slashdot would wind up in the same "community" as goatse.cx. Hmm...
What happens to journal articles relating to specific content? How do I find information for biology class?
Currently, I can search google and find things on the destruction of Balsam Fir in Newfoundland by Alces Alces (Moose), with this type of search engine, the journals wouldn't be listed because they themselves don't have links to anywhere (most of them are straight magazine to html conversions or PDF).
It'd be difficult as hell to find pertinent information above the level of "3y3 4m Johnny, And Dis 1s Mai W3bsite, 4nd H3r3 Ar3 Mai LinkZorz!"
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&num=10&q=relate d:slashdot.org/
. or g&btnG=Search
http://www.google.com/search?as_lq=www.slashdot
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This is great! Does this mean that we will finally have a search engine with categories that actually mean something? Until now, categories have mostly been self-proclaimed by the submiter to the search engine or the meta-tags on the site itself.
This could mean that browsing by category will become more and more useful in the future.
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Would be nice to have a sidebar for IE or any other browser that could be used as a filter for relevent topics from that site configurable with N depth for searching. Highlighting of relevant topic links and maybe even a graph view.
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
I've just searched Google for links to this author and his system, and can't find anything other than a citeseer reference to a project called Deadliner.
:-)
Anyway, this would be a much more interesting submission if there had been links to how the algorithm dealt with the computational complexity, or had a site we could Slashdot
Winton
I remember my first page:
My fav site on the internet.
A list on unrelated pages all liked from one spot.
I wondering if there any of those left. And how the search engine would cope with them.
And another point. The article states that new categories can be found. How is the "crawler" going to define the name of the new categories? I feel that the article was too short on details. I mean as a concept it's great. But more information would be cool.
--=.=-- www.cyber2000.qc.ca
As much as I (and all of you) love Google, I wonder whether their moral high ground approach to search results would not exist if they did not already have the worlds traffic searching through their site.
Search engines come and go. When Google has to struggle for its existence against the Next Big Thing, how many of you really believe they won't sell out in order to keep themselves running, in effect putting the last nail in their own coffin.
We shall see.
(2,3-Benzopyrrole)
AFAIK, Google uses several criteria:
It looks off course for the words from your search but also at the words close to those (so if you look search string is 3 words and it finds them next to each other it gets a higher score than the words randomly found in the text). It also look at the links. Pages about the same topic that are linking to your page give a "vote" for your page. This looks a lot like the "new" search algorithm. Or is the new one the inverse? In stead of giving a vote to, it receives votes if it links to pages about the same topic.
The one thing I'm thinking is that they miss a lot of pages just because they do not contain links.
Anyways, there isn't a lot I haven't found on Google yet (thanks to all it's search engines: regular, open directory, images, news...)
I hope he patents this before Google steals his idea!
Joke
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
Problem with this: "most" websites do not link to sites with similar content. Most websites link to "partner" sites that have nothing in common with them -- after all, who links to a competitor?
Good websites link to similar sites -- academic websites link to simialr sites and sources. This type of search engine would be killer on Internet 2. But on our wonderful, chaotic, porn and paid link filled Internet 1, it's useless. Spider MSN and you'll get a circular web leading to homestore, ms.com, Freedom To Onnovate, ZDNet and Slate. Spider Sun and never find a single page in common with their close competitors like IBM.
What happens when sites get associated with their ads? Search on Microsoft Windows and grab a lot of casino and porn links...because a "security" site covered in porn banners was spidered and came up with top relevancy.
Now, combined with a click-to-rate-usefulness engine like Google, this could be an interesting novelty. But it'll never be the simple hands off site hunter the big Goo has become.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
The way I see it, this would work extremely well to find the most obscure references and complete information about a subject, but would be pretty bad for general purpose searching (a.k.a. googling). A subject like "cosplay" certainly tends to create a community of pages, but search for something like "distributed computing" or "operating systems".
If a search engine comes out of this, I think I'll first google for whatever I want, and if I can't find it/come out with too little info, I'd expand my search into this "communi-search"
for Britney's Breasts (aka Brit's Tits)
I don't want to get stuck in an infinite loop of teeny-bopper Britney webrings.
Community/cross linked pages or not, they aren't relevant to my search.
It seems to me that this is why web rings were started. The other thing that concerns me is what about the result speed. First you have to find a "good" page to start from and then follow its links ( and we all know they can get off topic really fast). Then if that one doesnt link to good pages start from another "good" page. nasty cycle.
I do believe it is a good idea but the person that thinks that all relevant pages link to more relevant pages has been taking more than harmless smoke breaks.
If I were only smart enough to accomplish the things I dream about.. Or maybe too dumb to care.
Google pioneered the use of links to deducepages' relevance. Its PageRank technology counts a link from site A to site B as a vote for B from A. But it does not take account of all the other sites to which A has links, as NEC's new technique does.
I won't pretend to know all the inner workings of google's search engine technology. But I believe that google DOES care about other links from site A. This falls into the hub and authority model, which is definined recursively. A hub is a site that links to a lot of authority sites. An authority site is a site that is linked to by a lot of hubs. Basically, authorities provide the content, and hubs provide links to the content. In this example, B is an authority site, and A is a hub.
The way the ranking works, is that if B is linked to by a large number of quality hub sites, then it has a respectively large quality rating. Likewise, if a hub links to a large quantity of high quality authority sites, then its quality will also be ranked highly as a result.
This also allows Google to provide links to sites even if the search terms don't match the content of that site. A hub that links to a lot of sites about cars will relate cars to ALL the links regardless if the word "car" is included on the site that is provided.
Of course, I'm not THAT familiar with google. Its possible I'm full of bunk. But I'm pretty sure it works this way to some extent and that google does pay attention to the hub based links.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Here are a few papers that better describe the rank technology involved:
/ v5 i1p1.html
x tr acting_macrosopic_information_from_web_links.pdf
http://www.cindoc.csic.es/cybermetrics/articles
http://www.scit.wlv.ac.uk/~cm1993/papers/2001_E
.
Quidquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
Here is the research working paper that goes into detail.
~ fact is not dependant upon your belief therein. ~ ~ Have I therefore become your enemy because I tell you the truth?
Since so many of the Adult sites seem to have their "Please leave now..." links pointed at disney.com or nickelodeon.com or something.... will they end up in the adult communities? :)
Not that I would know...
Clustering pages is what other search engines like Teoma are doing already.
In a recent interview in c't magazine, a Google employee (Urs Hölzle) said, when asked about clustering, that they had tried that a long time ago, but they never got it to work successfully. He mentioned two problems:
- the algorithms they came up with delivered about 20 percent junk links for almost all topics
- it's hard to find the right categories and give them correct names, esp. for very generic queries
Of course, just because Google didn't get it to work properly doesn't mean nobody else can. But it's harder than it looks, and it's been known for quite a while.
This sounds like a useful idea and give use better directory systems, but its utility would be limited. Im sure there will be people poking holes in this algorithm in no time. Slashdot has a odd mix of subjects loosely tied together. News for Nerds is not a very strict group. Classification and grouping is a hard problem. There is no clear black and white, there are many shades of gray.
Interesting, but not as intersting as Google Bombing
--
Guilty
Many sites also have advertisements that are related to the web site content usually in the form of pop-up ads or banners. Some are now trying to implement an insane subscription fee to avoid the advertisements
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A better way to state this might be:
"The article also points out, this kind of filtering can provide more useful content, as compared to today's text-based filtering."
The internet is the world's best source of information and while transport of that information is built in, organization of that information is not. We have only half an internet.
We will really know what is out there on the net when Cisco includes a search function in their routers. Distributed searching. Access to over 90% of the world's data. Anonymous usage statistics. Person X searched for data (a) and spent the most time at www.example.xyz. Cross refrence it all and include hooks into TCP/IP V.x for cataloging search, usage and content statistics.
A website might contain information about leftover wiffle-waffles. That website sends that same data 1000 times an hour to end users. I want the router to pipe up "1000 unique page veiws for leftover wiffle-waffles" somewhere else a router says "500 unique page veiws for leftover wiffle-waffles". So when I do my search, I get 2 hits, most popular and second most popular.
Why incorperate it into TCP/IP? what good is moving all that data if it is just a morass of chaos? Let that which transports it also serve to catalog it. Currently, user data's content is transparent to TCP/IP. But if I wanted my data to be found, I could enclose tags that would allow the Router to sniff my data, insuring my data was included in the next real time search.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Interesting article here at http://www.operatingthetan.com/google/ about how the Church of Scientology exploits google's ranking system.
The basic gist is that google flags pages as more important (or higher relevance) if they have more links pointing to them...so the CoS makes thousands of spam pages that points at its main pages. Google sees the thousands of links, assigns the main CoS pages a high relevance, and thus they're the first to come up in any scientology-related search.
The moral being, for any new cool search technique devised to help fetch more relevant content, there'll be someone out there looking for a way to defeat it.
So, this only holds true with a focused sites. Using links, but then checking the links based on text would be useful, but not just links alone.
Fight Spammers!
I don't really buy into the idea that linked pages will necessarily be related to the same subject. Look at sites like slashdot or cnn, which link to a variety of pages in totally disparate subjects. If you applied transitivity, then you'd end up with every connected page on the web being on the same subject. Page A links to B, so B is probably on the same subject as A. Page B, links to page C, and therefore is probably on the same subject as B, and therefore A as well...Oops. The task of categorizing pages, unfortuately may always have to be done by humans to be done well. This type of software might help categorizing websites, but it won't replace wetware anytime soon.
-- Adam
So it's actually working on the basis of webs of related sites - not a novel concept, but useful.
I suspect that some of the commercial knowledge management tools have been doing something much like this for some time, and TheBrain.com has had a product to manually build this kind of network of clusters for some time. The key thing about this is that with web indexing/cataloging the information needed to do the automatic linking is available.
TheBrain.com seems to have a working demo of using it for the Web at WebBrain.com based on the Open Directory Project. It's not a great example because of display limitations that don't really let you see more than one cluster of information at the time, but it's one example of the general concept. Once you dig down in an area you can see how it shows links between related categories as well.
Note: the demo above says it requires Java 1.1 and IE 4.01 or Netscape 4.07+, to bypass that test try here. Seems to work fine in Netscape 6.2, and will probably be OK in Mozilla if the JRE is available.)
fencepost
just a little off
How about displaying on a 3D image dots as file with the zero point of xyz being the absolute most significant and the nspread out the hits from there? that way we can zoom in on what interests us in the search.
I.E. search for linux apache router
linux is one axis, apache is another and router is a 3rd. if the pages are relevent in that context then the closer to zero they will show up while linux apache donuts will resolve close to zero on the XY but be way out on the Z axis..
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
What I would like is for search engines to update more often so that you can find breaking news with the search engine.
This work is not new. In fact I submitted my undergraduate thesis on this topic. The roots of this work is really in citation analysis where the idea is that references that are highly cited are high quality references (this is the idea that Google is built around). Extending this to the web, a "reference" can be thought of as a "link" and you can generalize the hypothesis to the idea to: "similar works link to each other" and therefore you should be able to find communities of similar documents by following links within documents.
Intuitively this seems reasonable and in practice this is often the case when there is no conflict of interest for a document to link to another document (as in the case of researchers linking to other works in their field). Yet, often this is not the case when there *are* conflicts of interest (a pro-life site will probably not link to a pro-choice site;BMW will probably not link to Honda or any of it's other competitors). Therefore, since the truth of the hypothesis that "similar documents link to each other" is not clear, I worked to test this very idea.
To do this I used The Fish Search, Shark Search, and other more advanced "targeted crawling algorithms" that take connectivity of documents into account (as is discussed in the Nature article), but these algorithms often go further than just using the link relationship by taking the contextual text of the link itself as well as the text surrounding the link into account too when choosing which links are the "best ones" that should be followed in order to discover a community of documents that are related in a reasonable amount of time (you'd have to crawl through a lot of documents if documents have as few as, say, 6 links per page on average! Choosing good links to follow is crucial for timely discovery of communities). The conlusion of my thesis was that it is (unfortunately) still not clear whether the hypothesis holds. I only did this work on a small subset of web documents (about 1/4 million pages) so perhaps a better conclusion would be reached by using a larger set of documents (adding more documents can potentially add more links between documents in a collection). What I did discover however, was that if document communities do exist, you have a statistically good chance of discovering a large subset of the documents in the community by starting from any document within the community and crawling to a depth of no more than 6 links away from the starting point. (This turns out to be useful to know so that your crawler knows a bound on the depth it has to crawl from any starting point). Moreover, if you have a mechanism for obtaining backlinks (ie. the documents that link to the current document) you can do discover even more of the community...
The idea predates Google, it probably predates you. They did it in print, way back when.
Ug, a 2D web directory is confusing enough.
The CoS isn't the only ones who try to use this technique in order to make their sites rise in search engine ratings.
There are a number of those "Get More Hits For Your Website Cheap!" sites which try to do so by getting member sites to download an html file which contains links to most of their members, and then have you link this from your own site.
Much like a pyramid scheme, as new members join the get the same file with links to your site, thereby increasing the number of sites with links to you and possibly raising your position in search engines.
It'll suck when you do a search for slashdot and it returns links for goatsecx
You make a very interesting point:
Problem with this: "most" websites do not link to sites with similar content. Most websites link to "partner" sites that have nothing in common with them -- after all, who links to a competitor?
Good websites link to similar sites -- academic websites link to simialr sites and sources.
Combine the algorithm described in this article with google's approach (or some other contextual approach to deterimining relevance) and you not only have a way of identifying "communities," you have a way of easilly identifying "marketdroid mazes of worthless links" as well.
Since the content of most marketdroid sites is usually next to worthless, the hits for a given search could be ordered accordingly. Sites, and groups of sites, that clearly form communities related to the topic you're interested in at the top, single websites as yet to be linked to somehwere in the middle, and marketdroid "partner" sites at the very bottom.
This would actually produce better, more useful results than either approach alone.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
What I'd really like to see is a search engine that can differentiate (reasonably well) between sites with information and sites that are trying to sell you something. It seems that whenever I'm looking for a good info page about X, all I can find is someone trying to sell me X, and vice versa.
I would imagine that using modern search engine techniques, one would be able to determine what commercial pages "generally" look like, and what informational pages "generally" look like, and categorize appropriately. If you used a learning neural network, you could even accept user ratings on specific search results and use that to fine-tune the algorithm.
What about doubleclick? Their servers link to anything and everything that nobody finds interesting!
I think it's a great concept that will make lesser known content accessible to the average user. Instead of spending almost all their online time on a few huge sites (AOL, MSN, CNN, and a few other media giants), we can jump to a page with the same topic but no advertising budget. But how do you rank and order the list of members? Traditional text search? Even if a community has only a few hundred members, few users will go to page five in the list to find a site. Admittedly, it's only a matter of time before you can pay to be listed at the top of the community membership, instead of a random listing.
And like all good ideas, this system wouldn't be free of abusers. People could always spam their page with links to major sites using single pixel clear gifs, thus making their page a part of any community I wanted. So it becomes a process of "give me sites with links like this page, but not links like the following black hole listed pages." Useful for filtering content (for good or bad reasons).
RC
I actually came up with a similar idea 3 years ago. Not that anyone will believe me, but kudos to the people who actually put some work into it instead of me sittin on half and idea.
See http://webselforganization.com/ for more details and examples.
So it's safe to assume that webmaster's never link to other interesting pages, pages that don't necessarily have anything to do with that particular topic.
I don't think so.
Instead of getting a porn link in every search, now you get counter links and online casino links, this is a great improvement.
I guess when we get bored though we can search for search engines and watch the system grind to a halt.
the ad (Visa checkcard?) where Kevin Bacon forgets his ID and brings in six people who know each other until the last one knows the store clerk? I need an MPG of that one.
I believe feeling bad for Disney constitutes a thoughtcrime on Slashdot right now.. ;)
All movements for social change begin as missions, evolve into businesses, and end up as rackets.
How long before someone claims that organizing and using information which relates various sites this way is some sort of privacy violation?
"The first application of community searching may be to fence off areas of the web such as pornography or hate-speech communities, says Flake." N2H2 has been doing exactly that for a couple of years now.
See http://webselforganization.com/ for the research paper, more details, and examples.
For anyone out there who doesn't quite know why this is +5 worthy, here is the joke:
:) This is, of course, a very pop-culture oriented joke that will probably fade even more quickly than AYB did after its behemoth prime of last year and the December before. Long live the meme.
Super Bowl Sunday a commercial aired, featuring none other than Kevin Bacon at a retail store, trying to use a check to pay for his goods. The man behind the counter asked to see ID, but Bacon didn't have any on him. What now? Bacon runs around town gathering people (an extra he played in a movie with, a doctor, a priest, an attracive girl, and maybe one other guy?), who all had some ties to one another, through the other 6 in the group. The attractive girl once dated the sales clerk in the store, so Kevin explains that they are "practically bothers," hence putting to good use the principle of 7 degrees of seperation.
Therefore, the humor lies within.
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.
http://www.genxius.com
no ad's
no banners
just geek content
Just put up a dozen or two web pages on a dozen or two different free websites with links that point wildly all over the net, especially to pr0n. MUHUHAAAAAA
Life Sucks... Have a Beer and a Smoke then Smile Damnit!!!
Why do all the fanboys who swallow stuff that has yet to actually prove worthwhile in the real world mod comments lauding this stuff up?
It reminds me of all the graphics chip makers, computer chip makers, heck, even zeosync with their incredible breakthroughs. 90% of the time, when anyone takes a hard look at it it turns out to be a waste of time and money.
So, before proclaiming this the "next generation over Google" why not check to make sure google hasn't already thought of it and discarded the idea. Or that it won't lead to stupid circular clusters, 90% of the time I'm not interested in partner sites, but competitior sites. Is slashdot in the Microsoft cluster?
And above all, stop the judgement calls like "this is the next generation" unless you've got some special insight and qualification to make that call.
Hm. That's not the problem I see right off the bat-- yeah we'll have a bunch of people trying to scam their way to the top, but we have that now as it is. The problem that I see is that sites that link to a large number of sites, and that have a large number of sites that link to them will be considered part of more communities while sites with a lot of relevant interesting text but who have few links and few linkers will be considered to be part of fewer communities.
The issue of people creating mass pages of links could be resolved by "teaching" the engine to ignore sites that link to too many different threads, thus cutting out search engine directories, blogs, and other "topic-non specific" pages, or lumping them together as another category.
Sort of "If a page has x number of links to y number of topics then it can be considered for category z but if y is higher than the allowed number..."
Or something... Oh God. I need my caffiene.
-Sara
Clever does Google one better by separating the results of searches into "hubs" and content. Hubs are sites with lots of links on a particular subject. Content sites are the highly rated sites linked to by the hubs.
I thought it was a very intersting concept and I am surprised that it was not comercialized. Of course, IBM is in the business of buying banner ads rather than selling them. They could always do like /. and OSDN and mostly run ads for their own stuff though....
Lasers Controlled Games!
I'd think this would be a lousy way to index commercial sites, which would avoid linking to each other. e.g. the one link you're sure not to find on Ford.com is Generalmotors.com!
Democracy is the worst form of government ever devised, except for all the others. -Winston Churchill
I would see this as a bad thing, because I could easily confuse this "community" of related pages theory.
:)
In fact I see a lot of pages on the web that would break this. A lot of people make their own sort of "bookmarks" page that they can get to from anywhere on the web, then use that to click links and go to their favorite web pages. These pages may not be related at all. E.g. I could have slashdot and my favorite porn page on the same bookmark page, not really related, but doing a search for slashdot would find my page, then see a porn page as being related?
Sounds about right
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Showing 1-10 of 2.527e8:
Solomon Chang
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"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
The principle of pages linking to similar pages was known aeons (well, as long as there has been hyperlinks) ago.
Now that I've wasted WAY too much company time doing this, I must report that I was able to get from Slashdot to one of my personal web sites with only 6 jumps.
It wasn't six clicks, because I didn't count things like splash screens, click-through ads, and drilling into a site's "Links" page.
But I'm happy to report that I was able to get to my site with only five intervening web sites. I won't post actual links here, but you're welcome to try and follow along (if you're so inclined)...
Of course, now I've posted, you can just hit the URL beside my name and get there in two clicks...
I should also say that this is not a silly attempt at advertising. I don't make any money off my web site. It's just a silly attempt at demonstrating the interconnectedness of the web, and the oneness of human knowledge (yeah, that's it).
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
In addition to the other replies, here's the link to the Oracle of Bacon that lets you find out the degree of separation between Kevin and any other person who is featured at IMDB.
There is also a generic search that lets you combine any actor with any other actor. Unfortunately I have forgotten who the best-connected actor was (average to all other actors is smallest). Anyone?
Blogs are VERY specific.
/. , which I do not).
....
How?
Simple, until a year or so ago I did not even know that such a thing existed. (well, unless you count
Blogs themselves exist in a sort of quasi-weird community that many users never stumble on to, they are very self referencing to one another and tend to link within them selves a lot.
Heck look at Keenspace (which many people use as a sort of weird graphical Blog. . . . ), comics on there always link from one keenspace comic to another, and those other comics then typicaly link back to the origin comic and
WOH, new idea, hold on, annyways. Toodles.
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Amazon.com is an example of this: I bought a pair of speakers from them a several months ago, and yet every time I go there, they helpfully inform me that they have these great new speakers on sale! Buy now! I suppose it works to recommend similar books and CDs, but when someone buys speakers, they usually stop being in the market for speakers after that.
Anyway, I don't know why no-one has thought of making an e-commerce-only search engine. I think there's a clear distinction between those two types of searching that warrants a separate engine. Sometimes you want to buy stuff, and sometimes you just want information. When you are doing one, the other just gets in the way, and disguising advertising as content like AOL/MSN/AltaVista do just discourages you from using their services. Obviously, web-based businesses have a long way to go before they actually realize, "Oh, Internet users don't like to be tricked! Maybe if we were straight-forward with consumers they'd be more trusting of us."
"It's Dot Com!"
Anybody else here (well, obviously, likely quite a few people) ever browse around foreign (to me at least. :P ) language sites?
/.'ers typically frequent.
/. people tend to get all freaked out about it. ^_^ )
:) ) likes to sprinkle relevant to kind of relevant links throughout his articles and reviews. Almost all of the links are VERY interesting and much can be learned from them (he does link to e2.com quite a bit though. :P ) but that many of the links are to further outside resources on the same topic.
The culture that exists there-in is defiantly quite different.
Japanese sites are even MORE self referencing then American sites. This trend has taken off onto American sites though in the form of Cliques, which themselves tend to lie outside of the sites that many of us
Seriously though, in Japan it seems that sites actually have others ask permission to link to them! (As an aside, whenever that topic is brought up here on
This obviously creates a VERY different social structure that heavily alters the dissemination of information, not to mention the way that sites are linked together.
Here in the states (or any other culture that has pretty much a free linking policy) it is common to say "oh yah, and for more info go to this site over here and also this site here has some good information and and and . . . . "
Anybody who reads www.dansdata.com knows how he (uh, Dan obviously.
(such as a LED light review having links to the Online LED museum)
In a culture where linking is no so free, I would think that there would be more of a trend towards keeping a lot of the information in-house so to speak, and thus at the very least the bias's that the search engine uses to judge relevance of links would have to be altered a bit.
Links would have to be given a higher individual weight, since their would be a larger chance of them being on topic.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Prof. Jon Kleinberg of Cornell did this work many years ago. IIRC, he was the first to come up with the idea (first published in 1997). Check out his list of publications for the work (and related stuff).
Disclaimer: I happen to know him, but this is not biased.
Does this mean that doubleclick must be a wealth of information? There certainly is a number of sites linking to it...
- MbM
So [difficulty in navigating a 3D UI] is why nobody plays Q3A?
Quake III: Arena (original levels, no mods) is mostly 2 1/2 dimensional. In terms of actual gameplay, it's really no more 3D than Doom. Descent and friends, on the other hand, are 3D, but they're quite a bit less popular.
Besides, 3D is for games, which are supposed to be a challenge. Finding information on the Internet is not supposed to be a challenge. You really shouldn't be using 3D unless you're trying to represent a solid object, and even then use it sparingly. Even Q3A uses a 2D menu interface.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I usually search for help with problems dealing with work. Most of these searches are how to do something in Linux/C++/STL/etc. My problem isn't finding good hits, but spending all the time to read those good hits to find usable information. I'm not sure an algorithm will help me out there. I'd would much rather have a better interface to a search engine then a better search engine algorithm.
I high school (10 years ago) we had an assignment about thinking about how to map cyberspace. My partner and I decided that the best way was via a Ven diagram as oppossed to a physical map of where machines actually were. That is, map the information (then mostly on ftp, gopher, and non-internet BBS's) by subject. You would have a "sports" circle and a "medicine" circle and the overlap would be sports medicine. As a hobby, I've been trying to make such maps every since.
Later, in college, I tried to model a website as a physical system with the links acting like springs. You basically make up some formula causing different web pages to repulse each other and then make links give an attractive "force" that grows with the "distance" between web sites.
This gives you a system of equations that you can solve for an equillibrium point giving an "information distance" between web sites. This will tend to group websites on similar subjects together because they tend to link to each other.... but then again, who cares how close related are to each other, it should still be possible to get a cool picture with this data.
But the stopping point I came up against was how to represent these information distances as a space. I couldn't figure out how to calculate the dimensionality of the space. Was it 2-D, 3-D, or 400-D?
Here's an example of why this is a problem: Take four points that are all 1 meter from each other. In 3-D these points form the corner of a tetrahedron, but you cannot draw these points in 2 dimensions. If I have N equidistant points, I need a space with at least N-1 dimensions.
So how many web pages can be at the same "information distance" from each other? How many dimensions are needed to map the web this way?
Maybe this question only interests me, but I find it fascinating.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
I'd hate to rain on your parade, Taco, but this
is hardly news in the search engine industry. There are in fact search engines which do this today and have done so for quite a while.
How about new ways to query the data?h tml
Especially since Google tends to break its advanced operators.
http://www.google.com/help/operators.
That is to say that they sometimes lose their special meeting
"Before all the ruckus of living in a "global village" where we are all connected via the internet, there was the idea of "six degrees of separation," or the "small world theory." The theory posits the idea that everyone in the world is separated from everyone else by only an average of six people. That is to say, the only thing which separates you from the President, the Pope, a farmer in China, and Kevin Bacon is six people.
:), Jenny :P, Bill :{, and Chrissy 23).
It's a strange and beautiful concept. It is fascinating to think that we are all in some way interrelated by only six people or that we have some connection to people even in the remotest part of the world.
The "small world" theory was first proposed by the eminent psychologist, Stanley Milgram. In 1967 he conducted a study where he gave 150 random people from Omaha, Nebraska and Wichita, Kansas a folder which contained a name and some personal data of a target person across the country. They were instructed to pass the document folder on to one friend that they felt would most likely know the target person.
To his surprise, the number of intermediary steps ranged from 2 to 10, with 5 being the most common number (where 6 came from is anyone's guess). What the study proved was how closely we are connected to seemingly disparate parts of the world. It also provided an explanation for why gossip, jokes, forwards, and even diseases could rapidly spread through a population.
Of course, the six people that connect you and the President aren't just any six people. The study showed that some people are more connected than others and act as "short cuts," or hubs which connect you to other people.
Take for example, your connection with a doctor in Africa. Chances are your six childhood friends who you've grown up with aren't going to connect you to someone across the country, much less across the ocean. But let's say you meet someone in college who travels often, or is involved in the military or the Peace Corp. That one person who has traveled and has had contact with a myriad of other people will be your "short cut" to that doctor in Africa.
Likewise, say that you want to figure out your connection to a favorite Hollywood socialite. If you have a friend who is well connected in the Industry, that person will act as a bridge between your sphere of existence and the Hollywood circuit.
The Proof
Mathematicians have created models proving the validity of the "small world" theory.
First, there is the Regular Network model where people are linked to only their closest neighbors. Imagine growing up in a cave and the only people you have contact with for the rest of your life are in that cave with you.
Then there is the Random Network model where people are randomly connected to other people regardless of distance, space, etc..
In the real world, human interconnectedness is a synthesis of these two models. We are intimately connected to the people in our immediate vicinity (Regular Network), but we are also connected to people from distant random places (Random Network) through such means as travel, college, and work. It is by our intermingling with different people that our connections increase.
You may meet someone in class that is from a different country, or whose father works in Hollywood, or whose mother owns a magazine. By this mingling and constant interaction your potential contact with the rest of the world increases exponentially.
The Internet
The Small World theory is interesting in light of recent advances in communication technology--namely, the internet.
You can now instantly make contact with someone across the world through a chat room, email, or through ICQ. In all of human history, it has never been easier to get in tough with someone across the globe.
The great irony, of course, is that although we are making contact with such a vast number of people, the quality of the contact is becoming terribly depersonalized. Our email, chat, and ICQ friends may number in the hundreds, but for the most part we'll only know them as a line of text skittering across the screen and a computer beep.
That's not to say that there is never a cross over from the virtual world of the internet to the "real" world. But a majority of the time, the closest you'll get to actually meeting your fellow e-buddies in the flesh are the pictures they email you (notice how everyone oddly looks like Pam Lee or Tom Cruise), or a series of smilies (meet my friend Sandra
Never in the history of mankind has there been so much technology to keep us connected.This is with so little true connection. Everything from cellular phones, pagers, voice mail, and email were designed so that we would never be alone again. Human contact would only be a few convenient buttons away. But what seems to be happening is that the convenient buttons are superceding real people. Despite the appearance of all this technology, we're still pretty much where we started, with the exception of a motley crew of digital displays, flashing lights, and cutesy computer alerts to keep us company.
Don't get me wrong. The Internet Revolution is great and is making our lives easier. But as with ice cream, money, and sex -- too much of a good thing can be bad (money and sex are sometimes exceptions). What good are all the conveniences and promises of instant material gratification if you don't really live. The virtual world is good, but we shouldn't forsake it for the real world. The macabre image in the Matrix where we are all plugged into computers unbeknownst to us is a parable of what could be our future. A future where people never leave their homes and where we're all so dependent on computers. We wouldn't be able to walk outside without a pang of separation anxiety.
As we enter the new millennium, there is no doubt that we will be living increasingly wired existences. Perhaps Milgram's study will be annotated, and perhaps we will find that we're only separated by three degrees of email. But what good is that if the only "handshakes" going on are between our computers??
Russ
but it's worth repeating.
Google.com is popular because of it's high moral ground, which it has had since the beginning.
I personally switched to Google because:
* it gave me more accurate results
* it has a fast loading page
* it had an honest results policy
* it's not a parasite site, running on the coat tails of others (eg. metacrawler)
The reasons I continue to use Google are:
* as above
* it has inoffensive (to me) advertising
* it has a toolbar that saves me time on searching
* it's as good as a spellchecker
* it can display pdf files in html
* it can search pdf files
* google cache
they have both... while they get a lot of extra links, some of these "escape" links are really quite sarcastic in their reference to Disney, and it's not neccessarily a compliment to their content... I have seen a lot of humor sites that link to Disney if you can't handle jokes etc... really, I'm not sure that Disney deserves feeling at all, it's merely a quirk of society...
...about 1/2 to 2/3 of the way through a book I am reading called "Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software" by Steven Johnson.
/. specifically - and noting how the whole rating and karma system gives rise to feedback, and may allow such discussion groups to become, over time, emergent. I haven't read anything yet about p2p in the book (the way the book reads, it seems like it was written or originally published longer ago than it seems), but I tend to wonder if emergence will be found there...
At the point where I am reading, Johnson is discussing how emergence is closely tied to feedback, and without feedback, emergence doesn't occur. Thus, cities and businesses tend to be emergent (is that a word?) entities, while the web typically isn't. Because links on the web tend to be "one way", and information isn't communicated back, he argues that emergence can't take place.
Someone else has made a post here discussing how on Japanese web sites, it is expected that before you link to a site, you ask the operator of the site permission. The poster then says that for American sites, it is more of a "sprinkle willy-nilly" (my words) type reference, without regard for the operators of the sites. However, at one time, netiquette was indeed to ask the operators to "swap links" - I remember doing this quite often. But I think what happened is that when businesses and the "ignorant masses" came online, less link-swapping occurred because many times you would email the admin of the machine, and never get a response. The feedback link was broken.
Johnson uses this argument to further his statement that because of this, the Web won't be emergent. But will the Japanese web spawn emergence?
Johnson then goes on to talk about weblogs (though he doesn't use that term), referencing
These kind of search engine technologies might help make the web turn around, and allow it to become emergent. I don't know if such thing would bode well for humanity, but it would be very interesting to see such a thing in practice (I highly reccommend the book I referenced above if you are into this kind of thing - it makes an excellent sequel of sorts to the book "Out of Control")...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Google does not do this, but Teoma has done it for some time, with results on the same level of accuracy as Teoma.
People in Soviet Russia, however, appear to be afflicted with amusing juxtapositions of the aforementioned situation
Sounds like it is too different from Googl's algorithm of using cross links as votes.
Gary Flake's work is excellent stuff, but I think Nature missed his point. The bibliometrics community has been doing link analysis for *50* years to identify academic communities by co-citation analysis. For some pointers, try Googling "cocitation analysis"
This is a laugh. In Information Systems lingo this is (very) old news. Its a variation on * clustering algorithms *, of which there are plenty.
The most complete pilot program in this topic is the Interspace I think. This project would lead the whole internet into another new pahse where Abstract content would classify the concepts ( not the pages) and provide another model for distibution media across the Interspace ( future of the Internet) IEEE computer society magazine suggest that this interspace would be online from 2005 Then all what we know bout Online info would chage :)
Please have a look at The Interspace
Currently I am working on a smilar model for Arabic culture. .Bil
This research is from the same people who created CiteSeer
Web pages contain lots of links to ads, some even more than they have useful links. If user-end solutions can barely filter these links/images out correctly, how is a server-side search engine supposed to do the same w/o slowing down the search immensely and/or misjudging many links? On the other hand, it would be a good way for the search engines to get advertising in...
Don't worry... the cicle won't be complete until disney.com links to many of the Adult sites! 8)
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
I worked in the search engine industry for some years. Term 'search algorithm' is a facile gloss over what is a complex business, usually meaning how a set of indexed objects are selected and ranked for presentation to the user. Link analysis, clustering and 'communities of interest' have been heavily investigated for years by both commercial and academic groups. There are various flavours ranging from a global popularity measurement, like Larry Page's "Page Rank" (part of Googles ranking algorithm) to damped term-frequency schemes in which pages linked to and linking from a page contribute search terms (keywords) on a sliding scale based on link type and 'distance' from the page. It is very hard to tell from the press release the particular twist these guys are applying.
The problem with most of these schemes is that they don't scale worth a damn or fail in the real world. What works on a small number of sites fails completely when you want to enable users to search the 'entire web'. Web search engines run very tight code on very many machines and have to cope with the fact that there is a lot of crap out there. Assumptions about link popularity follow the old rule that an optimist is likely to be dissappointed but a pessimist can always be pleasantly surprised.
Search engines have two ways of discovering pages, spidering and direct submission by site owners. The is quite an industry spamming them both ways. Spam here meaning trying to trick the engine into returning your site as relevant to a query when it isn't. Everyone wants to be top of the result list, even for searchers who are looking for something else - the goal is to drive traffic by any means.
All the engines are secretive about their spidering and ranking approaches because they are in an ongoing arms race with the spamming industry. Andre Broder at Altavista describes himself as being in the business of "adversarial information retrieval". 95% of submissions to Altavista are rejected as spam. At one time Infoseek had a site try to submit 2 million pages for indexing and was forced to limit all sites to one page.
Spammers try to increase their rankings by cross linking huge numbers of URL's, this is one reason why there are so many porn pages that consist of nothing but banner adds and links to other pages of the same. So link clustering analysis is used to eliminate many of these from being indexed.
Its pretty amazing that Google, et al produce results as good as they do!
You asked how I knew. I answered. I am sorry about being annoyed. Thanks for your response.
Lasers Controlled Games!
They stole my idea for the Google Programming Contest!
I checked some of my sites at Alexa, which tries to identify "related" sites. Sometimes, it shows mostly my other sites (since most of my sites link to each other). But often, it actually seemed to identify sites that are in fact "similar" or "related" in ways that seem correct. Note that Alexa uses actual user-activity data from its toolbar users, but it also appears to integrate that data along with keywords and links within sites. Try it with your own sites, or a site representing a particular community of interest, and see what results you get: http://info.alexa.com/
-- http://www.MarkWelch.com/ Pleasanton California
often the case when there is no conflict of interest for a document to link to another document (as in the case of researchers linking to other works in their field)
How drolly non-cynical. In fact, "citation inflation" is rife in the academic community: people cite their own papers, and they cite their colleagues' papers. Why not? It's free to cite your friends, it boosts their careers, and it's likely to result in a reciprocal citation.
Closely related is the practice of adding authors to your papers. I've seen CVs full of listings with six or more authors. It seems like a reasonable thing to do -- giving credit to everyone who helped you develop your ideas -- but what it really does is water down the value of the authorship, as suddenly a person who has only ever really participated in two or three meaningful projects has a CV with four pages of publications. (Or 8, or a dozen!)
And let the angel whom thou still hast serv'd tell thee ...
Just search for mouse, please leave now, or better: mouse, please get the hell out of here
Say no to software patents.