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Web Page Entanglement
jason continues:
"By viewing the web through a tangle proxy, you can see the connections and associations left by those who surfed the web before you. By surfing the web using tangle, you also leave behind connections and associations for others who will surf in the future.
When you exit one page and enter another (by clicking a link or performing a search), a two-way link is created between the pages. As users surf through a particular page over time, tangle keeps track of popular ways to get to the page and popular places to go next. These entry and exit links are displayed at the top of each page, sorted by popularity.
Clicking on one of these entry/exit links tells tangle that you think the link is relevant and useful (like a vote for the link) and increases the link's popularity. In other words, if a user thinks of something relevant while reading a page and performs a search for it from that page, tangle gauges how others react to that association over time.
tangle is similar in some ways to the closed-loop hypertext system Everything2, though tangle works for the web at large.
We have several tangle proxies up and running. The tangle proxy software is also available for download.
A note for the paranoid:
Though tangle keeps track of web usage patterns, the focus is not on tracking the habits of individual users, but on tracking the trends of an entire community of users. tangle is GPL'd open source [source here], so you can see for yourself: clicking a link through a tangle proxy simply bumps up the links popularity---user IP addresses are completely ignored."
Microsoft does something similar with their Smart Tags. That is, they modify your page without you realizing it. Only with entanglement, it's done on the server, rather than on the browser.
Is there a way to block entanglement?
Brilliant, I can't believe someone hasn't come up with this before. It reminds me of the traveling salesment implementation that models the way ants work. Most ants go the way most ants go, everyonce and a while some ants stray to find a better path.
If this isn't abused by users, I see the net becoming much more efficient for searching for information. You won't have to wait for the search engines to catch up while looking for the most popular page on a topic, because the best (or should I say most popular) pages on a topic will automatically link to each other based on user flow.
Am I missing something here, or am I right in thinking this will revolutionize the way we surf (that is if enough sites do it.)?
Why, o why must the sky fall when I've learned to fly?
If the more popular links are shown first, doesn't it just reinforce their popularity? Once a link becomes popular, is there any way to vote it down?
Excluding mutually authenticated ssl sessions, how can I trust that the document I'm reading is the document I tried to download? The tangle service is already modifying the page to add its navigation links, so why not change the content too ( e.g. remove content that users might find offensive, replace ads on popular pages with ads that you've sold, change links to documents you host, etc. )? The same really goes for any proxy or cache service, and I'm not accusing these good people of doing this, but how do we protect ourselves from services that would as more of them appear?
If this caught on, I can imagine that it might be possible that people would tend to depend on it. It seems that information would become stagnate and new information ignored since nowone would have exited to it initally. Then again, maybe not. Just a thought.
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
Tangle is also the name of a literate programming utility by Donald Knuth. Along with WEB.
Don't get me wrong though, this is a very creative and useful thing. For example, this would be extremely useful for searching through technical support knowledge bases or for a large company's document archive system. I would just rather they leave my web surfing alone. ;)
A major backbone provider sets up automatic proxy redirection for http traffic, and uses proxies like this to gather links between pages, and with that, create a better search engine than google?
I just added something along those lines to my website. I agree it's a cool idea. Of course mine is way more simplistic ::P
-- taking over the world, we are.
no slashdotting anymore? is that it?...
Is anyone working on a personal P2P portal? Seems like an extension of what you're talking about. What I see is software which works like a webserver but is local and accessed P2P. Instead of DNS you use the P2P model to direct traffick and search for content, whether it is files or html/web media. All you'd need is a renderer (think gecko) hooked in to parse html, etc. to the peer who is browsing your site. This of course could also serve up blogs or calendars or whatever other types of web services you wanted to offer to your peers.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
this sounds like another tool for aome Farking asshat advertiser to use...Sorry things are bad enough as it is out here without this BS. I imagine a week befoerr the source has been modified and in use by someone to track and record every piece of infor they can get their grubby hands on...
I'm reminded of the idea of leaving your campus grounds unpaved, and then waiting for the "natural" grooves to appear in the ground where people walk, and then paving over those to make the sidewalks. You've probably seen an example of where there's a sidewalk connecting two points but then there's a worn-out groove nearby that's better, or connects from a more popular location.
Some people think it's rude or immature for people to create these grooves by not walking on the sidewalk, but I see it as an example of an arrogant designer who thinks he knows the best way simply by studying a piece of paper. It's amazing sometimes, the groove just appears almost magically in an optimal place, given the layout of buildings and traffic patterns.
This applies to web pages too. But, unlike sidewalks and buildings, you can't see your other destinations when you're sitting on a web page, so how do you know where to go next? This seems like it will just constantly reinforce the previous set of links, whatever they are.
I didn't fully read the documents (/. strikes again) but what I saw says you move from page to page either by 1) following an existing link or 2) using a search function. #1 is not going to create fresh paths.
It seems to me, a better idea would be to present a user with all possible links, or a subset of possible links, the first few times they visit. Then as they click through the site, add their arcs to the database.
After the first few visits, you can stop showing all links, and show them the "most popular" links. If you just show the popular links up front, new paths may not be discovered.
So perhaps this technique could be seen as a way to remove unpopular links, to trim the fat from a page. Then again, it might not be good to change a page after a person has gotten used to it.
It's very interesting though. As the web matures, you'll see more of this sort of analysis to move beyond static web pages.
So what happens when someone adds a line in their hosts file for gnu.org that points to a local server, adds a link to a modified version of the site with a link of their choice and clicks it?
People will naturally click on the top-ranked link(s) on a page in the hope that they're useful. If they're not, you've just voted for them, making them even higher ranked.
Google has a much better method for this - it looks to see how many links there are on the web at large to a page. People don't tend to link to stuff unless they like it. Although it's open to some abuse, it's a much better solution.