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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."
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...
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
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.
That's why us open source programmers always throw out and completely rewrite our programs from version 2.6 to version 2.8
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.
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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.
The fact is, we really don't have enough information as of yet to conclude whether this is a patch to PageRank, or a secondary system, running along side PageRank. One can assume it to be the former, but the latter could work just as well with Google's new corporate concept.
Imagine going into your Gmail account settings, adding a string of a few websites you deem to be "superior" or of better quality, and then let TrustRank grab the collection of all of these, note where the highest votes go, and use these as more "Trustworthy" search results. Or, using PageRank, it simply adds an option "Vote these sites higher because they are linked to the user defined site settings."
Both schema make Search Engine spamming more controllable by Google (Simply by terminating accounts linked to spammers), and could have an interesting effect. Can't wait to see what happens with TrustRank.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
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.
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
To see Google's TrustRank Trademark info on the USPTO site, click here , click "New User Form Search (Basic)", and search for "TrustRank".
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.
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.
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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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*!
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.
"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.
How is this different from applying a weighting to PageRank?
It attempts to detect clusters of pages which have few inbound links, which also propagating "trust" scores to all other sites by using their linking structure. For sites that have many inbound links (high scroring in pagerank), the authors claim this modification tends to classify spam and reputable sites differently.
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)?
No.
However, they will get better search engine visibility, which is quite valuable.
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?
The paper suggests using only highly reputable organizations with long-term stability for the seed pages. Government organizations, universities, very well known companies.
The analysis in the paper is based on a per-site graph, not per-page, by the way. They lacked the resources to try these computations on such a large data set.
Is this a possible method of abuse?
Presumably, the small set of seed pages/sites will need to be monitored by staff employed by the search engine company. If one of the trusted seed sites "went bad", they would need to be removed from the list.
Will that cool poster of links between websites now become 3D to give trusted links more prominence?
Probably not.
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