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Google TrustRank

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the trust-no-one dept.

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."

20 of 176 comments (clear)

  1. more censorship, unimpressed by teh_mykel · · Score: 1, Interesting

    so when google desides what's trusted for us, what is good content and what isnt, are they still not being "evil"? additionally, how are the pages seperated? on what criteria? man or machine (potential for flaws on either side)?

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    1. Re:more censorship, unimpressed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      "You fail to understand that google is incapable of actually censoring anything."

      Yes, they can. Their search results.

    2. Re:more censorship, unimpressed by teh_mykel · · Score: 2, Interesting

      its censorship in the same way that excluding undesireable content from television or radio is censorship.

      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.
      an anon has replied, "what is spam?" and i pose the same question. "spam" or unwanted content is far too complex an issue to be derived by a script. i could have a moodswing (or multiple personalitydisorder, or any number of other examples) and decide i want viagra one day. how will google's tech know what is and isnt crap? granted, there are bound to be select sites that actually do ship viagra, but there are countless millions more of simple shit. it would be a very complex task to weed out these unwanted pages, especially the 'small business' types (upstarts) with no PageRank preference.

      --
      this sig no verb
    3. Re:more censorship, unimpressed by generic-man · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Considering how much market share Google has, them not displaying a web page in their results (or dropping it a few hundred places) effectively removes it from the web.

      Google's primary responsibility now is to its shareholders. Google makes money from advertising. If Google can encourage you to patronize its advertisers instead of trusting its index for everything (which right now is pretty easily gamed), then Google makes more ad revenue and shareholders are happy.

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    4. Re:more censorship, unimpressed by ThJ · · Score: 2, Interesting

      This reminds me of the PageRank problem where all the porn sites link to Disney.com and if you searched for "sex" it would rank tops... Think of the implications...

  2. Conjuction? by tyleroar · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Are these going to be used in conjuction? It would be very nice to be able to sort out those pages that have nothing but a long list of keywords on them. It's probably all in vain, as somehow will sooner or later find a way to get around this, as well.

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  3. Cheeseh... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

    This sounds like a bit of a hack to me. PageRank worked once (and was great) but now spam is a real problem all Google can do is try and modify their original tech?

    We need new solutions, not patches on old ones.

  4. Potential abuse? by mferrier · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This is a step in the right direction conceptually, but giving a smaller number of "seed sites" more rank influence increases the potential fallout from any rank cheats that may be found in the future (see Google Bomb and Google 302 exploit.

    Google may be better off as they are currently leaving all sites initally equal in influence before the Pagerank calculation.

    Then again, Google has a great track record for testing their ideas before committing them to general service...

    1. Re:Potential abuse? by ciroknight · · Score: 5, Interesting

      With Google's "portal system" they're developing, the trust comes from within; the company trusts its users because they are clicking into an agreement of terms. That being said, hacks that would make this new TrustRank unreliable would probably just lead to the termination of services of the account.

      This to me keys that Google's trying to become a more involved company; instead of just sitting back, caching and searching the internet, they are now trying to serve you best and give you the results you are looking for. I would imagine with TrustRank, you will see a little star or something near a link on Google's home page, and the star would indicate if it is something in your field that you would be looking for. For example, if you were a Biologist and searched for a certain kind of fish, say "Blue Tuna", it would put stars next to sites with the fish's breeding habits, etc., but if you were a general consumer, it would provide links to the local fishery.

      The internet is an extremely powerful tool, and search engines have simply evolved to the point that they are now "dumb technology". Without more user invervention (and not simply by throwing in more keywords and praying), they will continue to be as they are now. Once the company better knows what we'll be looking for, they can better serve us. And that's all I see this new tech as being.

      --
      "Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
  5. Questions by tyroneking · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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)?
    What if such an owner decides to link to a page of commercial or spam links - will they get any money from the owner of the linked site? Is this a possible method of abuse?
    Will that cool poster of links between websites now become 3D to give trusted links more prominence?

  6. Similar to Advogato's? by OblongPlatypus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This sounds very similar to Advogato's trust metric, which uses a "seed" of trusted accounts to filter out trolls/spammers. The difference might be that it should be even easier to implement in the case of web pages, because they already have links to each other, avoiding the reliance on users to manually "certify" other user accounts in order to build the graph.

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    -- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
  7. Is the paper even the same thing? by protoshoggoth · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Given that one of the authors of the referenced paper is an employee of Yahoo, I have to wonder if whatever Google has in mind has anything whatsoever to do with the trustrank scheme we're talking about here. I mean, all we know is they trademarked the word, nothing more.

  8. Gmail spam filter? by thegnu · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I read another post speculating that gmail users could be used as voters to choose trusted sites. Something that would probably actually work would be tagging domains that are received by a certain percentage of the gmail population and NOT marked as junk, and then giving them weight according to their percentage.

    Becase we gmailers are picky.

    It would probably have to be integrated with something else, because I bet there are a few pr0n mailing lists that lots of people have.

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  9. PageRank is already no more what it used to be by thbb · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The google-watch page on PageRank already mentions how pagerank, over the years, has switched from an actual score of popularity (number of links to a page), to a trustrank-like index, based on the reputability of the links to a page. This makes it much harder for the newbie to get a good pagerank, and empowers way too much the owners of old web sites and corporate pages.

    Even though it contains way too much rant for my taste, google watch is worth a full read by all /.ers.

  10. Question. by ceeam · · Score: 1, Interesting

    If I search for "stoned whores" what sites should be considered trusted?

  11. This info is not intended to be read by a human. by mathmatt · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is wierd. It is the 19th hit (on the second page) of a google search for "trustrank" It requires a login from google's results page, but a google's cache reveals a directory including the paper linked to by /.

    I guess we weren't supposed to read this. And you shouldn't have read *this*!

  12. Personalised trust metrics by tdvaughan · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It would be amazing if Google gave us the ability to assign trust values to sites that we ourselves trust. This way, for example, I might give Wikipedia or the BBC a 10/10 trust rating for all their off-site links (and set it so that links off the linked sites are at 50% of their parent trust rating etc.). If we could also subscribe to someone else's trust ratings then technically illiterate people could hand over the responsibility of managing their trust database to someone else. From first thoughts, this looks like it could solve the problem of malicious SEO.

  13. hmmm ...... by thempstead · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ... would be nice if you could use adblock style filtering on Google search results, then if you wanted to get rid of certain results, (i.e. from blog or "sales" sites), you could block their domains.

    Probably wouldnt be that difficult to get around it but might help a bit

    t

  14. I think I have an easier way to explain it by NigelJohnstone · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Suppose you had the perfect Oracle that could check every search result and clean it of spam.

    Ranking by onpage text, links etc., the items that make a page relevant or not gives you:

    A. 1st most relevant.
    B. 2nd most relevant
    C. Spam
    D. 3rd most relevant
    E. 4th most relevant.
    F. Spam

    After your Oracle has hand checked every site you get:

    A. 1st most relevant.
    B. 2nd most relevant
    C. 3rd most relevant
    D. 4th most relevant.

    Not:

    A. 10th most relevant
    B. 2nd most relevant
    C. 8th most relevant
    D. 5th most relevant

    Ranking by trust as well as relevance gives you a clean but not very relevant result set.

  15. Spammy comment solution by joranbelar · · Score: 2, Interesting
    People like that put the mods in a tough position: On the one hand, you want to mod up insightful comments, but you don't want to reward spammy free Ipod links.

    I've got an idea: Anytime you see an informative and/or insightful post whose contents you would like to see modded up, but which has a spam-o-licious free [product] link in the sig, just copy the informative content into a new Anonymous Coward post, which the mods can then moderate higher, while the spammy parent can be modded down into obvlion.

    I'm sure, eventually, they'd learn ;)