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."
with the newly proposed AdSense plans?
Have you metaroderated recently?
Its not censorship. Google couldn't censor even if they wanted to. Rather than explaining to you what censorship means, let me just tell you that what Google is doing is siply doing their job better. I don't want to find spam when searching for anything, and neither does anyone else. Ergo, eliminating spam from the search results makes everyone (except spammers) happier.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Two points: 1) Any new system Google implements will run along the side of PageRank; they've invested too much to completely switch all of Google running to TrustRank. The system might even augment current PageRank by running an algorithm over the data that PageRank returns. We can only speculate as of now. But I can assure you that one will not replace the other, and there will probably be a way to use both systems in the future if you like. Hell, using your Gmail account, you may even be able to specifically tune PageRank, making certain pages more relevant to you appear higher in search results.
2) You have the option of not using Google. Yahoo is a completely independent search engine now.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
You know, new solutions are most often patched old ones.
:)
Should Google just throw away their many years of research, and start from scratch?
I find this trust-based approach interesting, but I wonder how it's gonna work for smaller sites (Which the few trusted seeds will not ever link to), but I guess the smaller sites don't really have a problem as it is, because only specific search-terms are targeted.
There's also the problem of allowing new websites into the game, but I guess that's for the Google developers to figure out.
My <1000 UID is with a hot chick
You fail to understand that google is incapable of actually censoring anything. Them not displaying a webpage in their results does not, indeed, remove it from the web.
Google's primary responsibility now is to it's shareholders, which means increasing the chance that you and I find exactly what we are trying to look for, and not to unabashedly display every peddler that serves up content over http.
It's not necessarily censorship. They could just present the "trustworthy" pages first. You could always skip to the later pages if you wanted, just like you can browse /. at -1 if you want.
And yes, this means that the system could be abused, just like PageRank and /. moderation. Anyone want to do away with those?
Google, as we all know, is a reputable service provider; they get the job done efficiently and innovatively. Now they are continuing their attack on the ails of the internet which was started by Gmail spam filtering. By developing this tool, Google is helping to clean the Internet up and enable it to become the massive source of pure information it has such potential to be. The "negative" sites on the Internet, such as keyword sites with no real content which invade search results, and the like are a bane to the community and by helping get rid of them, Google is yet again doing us all a favour. Google, I salute you.
"Google couldn't censor even if they wanted to."
Since when? Google is a privately owned corporation. They've got stock holder to answer to now, but it still stands that they can do what they want with what they own. They're not obligated to give you unfiltered results on their free, privately owned service.
How is this different from applying a weighting to PageRank? Will the owners of the pages / sites deemed to fall within the set of trusted seed sites get any money for all their hard work (i.e. hand-maintaining pages of links)?
Lemme give it a try;
It's probably exactly giving a weight to PageRank, but the question is "Where will the weight be applied?", before the PageRank calculation (as in giving links a higher Rank because they are from a more legit website) or after the PageRank calculation (as in giving the results a higher Rank due to their coming from a more legit site). Both systems make a drastic change to PageRank, but one makes TrustRank dependent on PageRank, the other makes it independent. Who knows as of now.
As of where will the trust be issued, I believe it will go through the gateway system they're developing now with Gmail. As Gmail users are universally better trusted (they signed up, making them humans, or so I would contest), they would most likely form the "Voting committee" for TrustRank.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
* When I say sleezeballs and tweeking, I mean the people who will try outrageous stunts to game the system, rather than the consultants who will help you increase rank by the stunning tactic of actually improving your site. Radical, but sometimes it works.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
No, probably the other way round.
If you're linked by a trusted page, then your rank goes up, but there's no negative for being linked by untrusted pages - your pagerank stays the same.
but you can always go to another search engine or go to the page directly.. so if they wanted/tried to censor, they'd only lose users.
so when google desides what's trusted for us, what is good content and what isnt, are they still not being "evil"?
Are you fucking kidding me? This is just another mechanism for deciding whether particular pages should be shown for queries. Show me a search engine that doesn't do that.
If you use a search engine, then by definition you are trusting them to show you relevant results. If you don't want to trust Google, then use another search engine. If you don't want to trust another search engine, them stop using them entirely.
Your basic complaint is against the very nature of a search engine. The hysteria surrounding Google now that they have gone public has blinded people to common sense. You don't have to scrutinise every little thing Google does to see if it's "evil". You just have to use some sense.
"so when google desides what's trusted for us, what is good content and what isnt, are they still not being "evil"?
Yes.
Why is it that everyone is constantly striving to find Google's evil? Ranking the relevancy of pages to a search is Google's job. By ranking spam as relevant to my search they have failed. Using the concept of a web of trust to establish relevancy is a fairly obvious solution and has well established analogs in other fields (e.g. PKI).
If you're looking for evil, try GE, GM, or Unilever. Google doesn't even begin to rank on the evil-o-meter.
"Freedom of Speech"
First of all, the only protection that is guaranteed you here is that the gov't will make no law abridging the freedom of speech.
Google, as influential as they might be, are not the government (insert 'Do No Evil' joke here). Therefore, they are not bound to this "Freedom of Speech" argument.
Secondly, "Freedom of Speech" is not this universal, higher-being ordained preserve at all cost idea that we have transformed it into.
Freedom of speech does not give you the right to spray-paint your slogan all over my front door, nor, in this case, does it give you a 'right' to be listed on Google. Nor do you have a 'right' to have your name printed on the front page of your local paper in 36pt font.
Not being listed in Google does not amount to censorship in any definition of the word. The net existed before google, and people still managed to find web-sites. Google gives (through PageRank or whatever mechanism they choose) free advertisement to 'good' sites. They have every right to only display sites that pay money, if they so desired. You have absolutely zero (0) 'rights' to be listed for free on Google.
Trotting out the Freedom of SPEECH argument is nothing more than whining about Big Brother coming to get you because what you have to say isn't worth hearing. Guess what? If you want to be heard, say something that's worth listening to. All that glitters is not gold, and much that is said (or printed) is worthless drivel. Much like this post.
Censorship would be making the content unavailable. They're simply bringing more relevent content to the top of the search, which is what a search engine is supposed to do in the first place. If yoou want what's considered to be spam, hit next a few times.
I really don't understand how these two concepts became conflated in the minds of so many people. "Censorship" is the act of preventing some unpleasant words, sounds, or images from being published. That implies the use or threat of physical force to do the preventing, because there are other publishers who have differing standards. "Editorial discretion" is something entirely different - it's the act of deciding what words, sounds, or images you personally wish to publish. It is, in fact, inherent in freedom of speech itself.
If Google decides that they didn't want to refer any traffic to certain kinds of information, then the people who want that stuff will have to find another search engine. They have to weigh that against the others who will welcome search results that they are looking for. Google's reputation is everything -- if they erode it, they cease to be relevant, and therefore profitable.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
It would be very nice to be able to sort out those pages that have nothing but a long list of keywords on them.
And thanks to fuckers like you, pages like THIS are full of "Free IPod" links.
You can't complain about spam of any sort when you are a spammer yourself.
I've read it but is sounds mixed up. Isn't the ideal result from a search engine:
Matches - spam - offtopic, sorted by relevence
not
Matches sorted by f(pagerank,trustrank)
Google used pagerank+on page text as a measure of how relevent a page is but thats not reliable anymore because the set contains spam pages.
The 'trusted' value tells you nothing about relevence, it only gives the likelyhood of the page being spam or not spam. If its spam you want it removed, if its not spam, then its page rank determines its relevence not some function of pagerank and trustrank.
i.e. they should not promote or demote pages because on trust rank, they simply define a cut off value K, if the trust is less than K then its likely spam and should be removed.
Since spam follows money terms, they should have K(keyphrase), so they can change the value of K on each keyphrase to remove the spam. Otherwise they will filter non money terms where no spam exists and their algo can only do harm!
One way they could do this would be to compare the number of times a link is clicked on their page ranking to the average. A lot of people can tell a spam site just from reading the google description, those sites won't be clicked on as much, even if they show up early in the rankings.
say the first listing is clicked 70% of the time, the second is clicked 20% of the time, third 10% of the time. If you have a set of search results that has click rates of 30%, 50%, and 5%. Then you could say that the first result is over ranked, the second is under ranked, and the third is over ranked.
"brxref
I think you're thinking of Hilltop, (scoring links from pages that score well on the same term but are not related otherwise) but Hilltop had a different problem it would favour sites with a home page on the topic and ignore authority sites with the relevent page buried, because other sites tend to link to the top page.
Pageranks works differently since it covers all search terms and is ignorant of the search phrase. Its is a "how important is this page on the net" rank.
This article is about trust rank, a sort of "this page has X% probability of being spam rank"
I think this trust rank is part of the current Google algo, it shows all the signs. I don't think its used like that in Yahoo.
Google current results are on topic but weak = It is inevitable that some authority pages that are on topic but untrusted will be kicked down making more second tier but non-authority sites come to the top -> shallow results of non-authority sites.
Deep searches hit or miss, will Google find it or not? Sometimes yes, sometimes no = A page about "hotels near montserrat monastry" is spam to someone looking for information on "monserrat monastry" but might be perfectly ontopic for "hotel with disable access ramp near monserrat monastry". The probability of spam is meaningless for that long phrase since it's so obscure as to be not the target of spam-> zero probability of spam. Yet the trustrank would penalise the page the same amount for both phrases.
That's why I think they should have a cut off per search phrase, on heavily spammed search phrases the cut off would be high trimming off many sites, on low spammed phrases it would be low or zero. The page might have 0.2 probability of being spam. For "cheap viagra" it would be below the 0.5 cutoff for that heavily spammed term and thrown away, but for "effects of viagra and how to obtain the same result on the cheap" is would be above the 0.001 cutoff and hence ontopic.
Strange fluctuations in serps: Two algos pushing against each other using the same basic page and link information -> chaotic butterfly wing flapping behaviour.