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."

Comments

Potential abuse?

[mferrier]

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...

Re:Potential abuse?

[ciroknight]

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.

Questions

[tyroneking]

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?

Similar to Advogato's?

[OblongPlatypus]

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.

Is the paper even the same thing?

[protoshoggoth]

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.

Gmail spam filter?

[thegnu]

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.

Re:more censorship, unimpressed

[generic-man]

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.

PageRank is already no more what it used to be

[thbb]

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.

This info is not intended to be read by a human.

[mathmatt]

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*!

Personalised trust metrics

[tdvaughan]

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.