Slashdot Mirror
Google TrustRank
Philipp Lenssen writes "Google registered a trademark for the word "TrustRank", as Search Engine Watch reveals. Is this a sign we can expect a follow-up to Google's PageRank? An earlier, possibly related paper on TrustRank is available; it proposes techniques to semi-automatically separate good pages from spam by the use of a small selection of reputable seed pages."
Yes, this is always a problem. How can you possibly know whether or not a site is spam just by looking at who's linked to it? A lot of great sites have very few external links to them and often they're from blogs and other sites that will likely be identified as spam prone.
This is a basic problem of filtering web-content. How do you avoid throwing out the baby with the bath water? I'm running into that problem in designing a custom filter to keep my son from inadvertently seeing pornography as he looks for his "r0mz," but that's peanuts compared to Google's dilemma.
The fact is, spam filtering is inherently censorship. This kind of interference will always have a negative impact on the marketplace of ideas that is the modern internet. On the other hand, as a side effect, removing blogs from search results (as this trust metric very likely will) may increase the usability of Google overall. I suspect there will be some people who are not as happy about that as I am.
-- Molly Lipton, Born Again Technologist.
To see Google's TrustRank Trademark info on the USPTO site, click here , click "New User Form Search (Basic)", and search for "TrustRank".