Slashdot Mirror
Search Results Based on Your Social Network
A new company, Delver, is offering a new take on web searching that plans to make your social network a part of the equation. "Liad Agmon, CEO of Delver, says that the site connects information about a user's social network with Web search results, "so you are searching the Web through the prism of your social graph." He explains that a person begins a search at Delver by typing in her name. Delver then crawls social-networking websites for widely available data about the user--such as a public LinkedIn profile--and builds a network of associated institutions and individuals based on that information. When the user enters a search query, results related to, produced by, or tagged by members of her social network are given priority. Lower down are results from people implicitly connected to the user, such as those relating to friends of friends, or people who attended the same college as the user. Finally, there may be some general results from the Web at the bottom."
But my "social graph" doesn't begin to be represented by my name(s).
I think this will just bias search results towards your friends who have the most free time, not necessarily the most informed or informative. I'm sure we all have that friend who thinks David Icke is right about the reptilians. Do you want his tagged sites at the top of every search you make related [stuff]?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
God help the poor soul who happens to have the same name as a midget S&M porn star.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
This sort of searching will result in information from "opposing sides" of controversies or arguments being deprecated, resulting in skewed information being available--because people tend to associate themselves with other people of the same opinion.
......so it's going to be an enormous success and if I had the cash I'd invest in it. :-/
E.G., all my friends are emacs people, so the first results will favor emacs, and any vi-related articles will be deprecated. Other nontrivial examples can be extrapolated.
This will merely serve to re-enforce any prejudice, bias, or slant that a person may have. Reading competing materials--seeing things that challenge one's own point of view--can only be healthy for one's point of view, rendering it much more cosmopolitan and much less insular than it would otherwise be.
In short: this new search engine will be wildly popular amongst the type of person who enjoys violent flamewars, and will be useless for any person who wishes to consider both sides of a situation before forming an opinion.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
I'm thoroughly unlikely to use a system that ranks my search results based on the preferences of my friends. I know *I* never put anything but the most basic information about me online (name and website is all that's required by the Geneva Convention, right?). So anyone whose searches are based on *my* stated interests will find a bunch of Dixie Chicks stuff, and little else.
And what about my searches based on *their* interests? Do I even *want* to know what they're doing with their time online? Even if the results aren't personalized ("Jim would probably like this link"), I'd rather not do a search on sushi restaurants and learn to my dismay that one or more of my friends has interests that include tentacle porn. And I don't even want to *think* about what could happen on a search for a good plate of cabrito!
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
This is going to be extremely useful if your name is John Smith.
In Soviet Russia, your socialist network searches you!
Seriously, can anyone see this being more pertinent than regular searches? I don't know about you people, but I don't necessarily have much in common with my few friends, so if a friend of mine is into Paris Hilton or international law that's not necessarily going to improve my search results in any good way.
You just got troll'd!
"Sorry, I can't friend you, you'll screw up my search results"
Somebody already tried this, as I discovered during a patent search.
Other weird search ideas included adjusting search preferences based on what other applications are running. If you seach for "gold", you get different responses depending on whether you're running Everquest or Excel.
What's more likely to work is ad personalization based on your social network. If your friends bought something, then promoting it to you is a promising idea. That's been proposed as PriceKut.
This kind of approach has the hidden danger that once you fall into a certain crowd, it's hard to dig your way out. It substantially increases the importance of choosing the right one because you might never climb out.
Consider how many people think they are Democrats or Republicans just because their parents are. (Parents are just an example, so don't be too quick to say that parents aren't the chosen network. There will be some chosen network and unless its attributes are freely advertised, you'll be signing up to have things done for you in ways that are subtle and related to others you think you know. It might just as well be "those drug fiends you kids run around with".)
Until the mid-1990's, I used to subscribe to paper magazines about technical topics. And I'd get a lot of junk mail from vendors offering me stuff. Increasingly, I found they talked about object-oriented programming and other topics I liked. At first, I thought all my topics were winning the hearts and minds of people. But after a while, I realized they had just pigeon-holed me as interested only in those topics. What started off as a benefit they were offering me was now a kind of Hell I had to live in... I'm sure there's some relevant Twilight Zone episode I should be referencing here, but you get my point.
Freedom comes with choice. One reason that a lot of people don't like political primaries is that it limits choice. If you can control the primary process (which has traditionally gotten very little oversight--though this year probably got more than average), you have a great deal of control of the election. People focus on the election as the thing that can be tampered with, and they make a polite fuss about who gets invited to this and that debate, about who takes this and that money, about the price of media, and so on. But it's those things, not a few hanging chads in the vote itself, that probably really sway the election. The damage is already done by time you reach the voting booth.
And what if everyone in the network is trusting everyone else, and no one is at the helm? Or what if someone deviates from the network--is that weighted low as anomalous or high as important that it wasn't statistically predicted and might signify something the group should peer at? I don't see leaving these questions to a search engine... I think people should retain this right and responsibility.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
See subject. I'm depressed. :(
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
In principal, I agree with your reasoning, but in practice most humans will not give credibility to anything that falls outside of their range of beliefs. The result being vi-or-die content isn't considered by the emacs-rulez crowd anyway.
Most people do not go out an intentionally re-evaluate their fragile, contradictory belief systems.
In theory, the solution would return more relevant results than google because they agree with the person's views/opinions/etc. It would turn google into something of an "academic" search engine versus their more popular one.
Definitely worth watching if they can return valuable results.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Google uses a basic citation index, but as far as I know doesn't consider references, multiple generations of citation, references or citations, citations of references, duplication of citations/references (mirrors should not weigh as much as originals), credibility of sources (not sure how you'd measure that one) or proximity to known good results (the user could flag good results, which could then be mined by a search engine to improve the search terms). This method, basically an adaptation of how academics look things up, is tried-and-tested but may still not be useful on the web where relationships between ideas can be tenuous or obscure.
Most search engines also (these days) spell-check terms, look up singular/plural forms and perform other trivial operations. Having it use a thesaurus for alternative meanings might be a good idea, too. This would produce more results, yes, but if you then applied stricter filtering on those results, and stricter weightings for sorting what's left, you should get about the same number of results in total with a higher percentage that are actually useful.
I can't help but remember a different, much older, search engine, though. CAS Online. This stored abstracts on chemistry papers. Virtually all of them that had ever been published. You performed not one search but many, where a search could be new or on the results from one or more previous searches, using set logic and a very primitive SQL-like query language. Because you could build on previous results, you always ended up with only a few results, almost all of which were highly relevent to what you wanted. However, as with attempts to use regular expressions in web searches, what is used (and useful) elsewhere may not be so useful or practical for Joe Average when searching the web.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
So Google doesn't invade your privacy enough?
I look forward to seeing what results it gives to "Jack Thompson -> animal porn" once it gets hacked/spammed, though.
Did you mean delvr? Results 1-10 of 12,000.
That would be cool if they used your friends and such to suggest you new people to become friends with, à la Last.fm, with people instead of music.
Well to LastNig.ht. According to your Facebook profile, you recently "hooked up" with Sally, Michelle and Brandy. LastNig.ht BETA suggests you to try to hook up with the following people : Stacy. Pam. Jeff.
You just got troll'd!
That's exactly what most of the dumbasses who vote people like Bush into office need: A world-view tuned more to what and who they already know.
Thanks for making sure they'll never be confronted with the world outside their small box.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I usually search the internet for things I don't already know. This seems like a really good way to keep me fenced into the stuff that I already know or that I've heard about from my friends.
I'd much rather have a search tool that eliminated all social network information from it's database. Never in my life have I wanted to search for "What did Mike do last night?"
"She's furniture with a pulse"
... looking for a date at a family reunion.
Have gnu, will travel.
hmmmm, i have a doubt if the guys have done some market research before run. there is a great product available that does the same- http://www.spock.com/ and it's also Google who wants to enter the game
So? Here in Shelbyville, we like it that way, you insensitive clod!
will now be Tom from Myspace.
It is really smart to do something about the search results, since the traditional search engines tends to be too hooked up on spam pages. Real people can provide real opinions - but are they reliable? Initially: maybe not, but over time: definitely! And of course you trust your friends better than others, so it is a smart move. My company is also in the recommendation engine business, so we are dealing with this matter every day. And from what we have seen, the positive force usually wins in the end... Looking forward to Delver's official opening.
Another piece of the search equation that we continue to think about within the enterprise and the collaboration software (http://icecore.com) used by its community.