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."
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
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
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...)
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
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
Slahsdot fills a different niche, one more similar to that of newspapers than to research sites. The purpose of slashdot is to provide an overview of many different areas. The new search idea would, as I understand it, work best on very narrow (esoteric perhaps) fields, such as the research into a certain area of a certain discipline. Because slashdot is more general it won't have the same community type setup and will likely not be effected by this new way of searching