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."
Slashdot must be the Kevin Bacon of the online world...
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
"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