Search Engine Results Relatively Fair 100
perkr writes "The Economist and PhysicsWeb report on a study from Indiana
University claiming that search engines have an egalitarian effect
that gives new pages a greater chance to be discovered, compared to
what would be the case in the absence of search engines. Based on an
analysis of Web traffic and topology, this result contradicts the
widely held 'Googlearchy' hypothesis according to which search engines
amplify the rich-get-richer dynamics of the Web."
More than fair to me (Score:3, Interesting)
An example of poor Google performance (Score:2, Interesting)
Try this search for Tartfuel http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=tartfuel [google.co.uk] once a local band. When Google claims to have 28,600 results, in fact there are only 36. Now that's a con. When I give search advice look through all the results and they look me to say "but there's millions". Never, if you're doing a specific search, Google won't even display a tenth page (which is the max).
So, of the 36 results, how many are real? There are 10 relating to the band, one about alcopops, and the other 20+ are spam. Their old website and every subdomain is of the generic spam-generated marketing page this is about 10, and theothers are spammed guestbooks linking to them.
http://classic-motor-bikes.tartfuel.co.uk/ [tartfuel.co.uk]
I'm not interested in Google until it can search through time. Damn, I wish the net archive had done a better job. Most of the content is of popular, mainstream commercial sites, which are so unoriginal, it's off little interest. And how many images did it save? Not enough.
Mod (-5) Google bashing. No. This applies to all the search engines.
My experience bears this out also (Score:5, Interesting)
That's not how it works (Score:2, Interesting)
Let's try a thought experiment... (Score:5, Interesting)
Most web newbies would form their impressions of the web from their ISP's portal site. That would give a lot of power to corps like AOL, who for a long time tried to persuade their subscribers that there was no web outside of AOL hosted content.
There might still be blogs and social networking sites, but the take up would be slowed since fewer people wold have heard of them, and both might have failed to ignite into the movement we see today.
Which would probably mean that if you wanted something outside of the main ISP channels, you'd be reduced to digging through the spam on USENET to find it.
Google as an egalitarian influence on the web? I think it's a bit of a no-brainer, personally.
Impact of Search Engines on Page Popularity (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems tough to reconcile these two sets of findings, and this new paper even makes mention of this:
"The connection between the popularity of a page and its acquisition of new links has led to the well-known rich-get-richer growth paradigm that explains many of the observed topological features of the Web. The present findings, however, show that several non-linear mechanisms involving search engine algorithms and user behavior regulate the popularity of pages. This calls for a new theoretical framework that considers more of the various behavioral and semantic issues that shape the evolution of the Web. How such a framework may yield coherent models that still agree with the Web's observed topological properties is a difficult and important theoretical
challenge."
Re:What is this? (Score:3, Interesting)
Pagerank is a Little Like Capital Flow... (Score:4, Interesting)
Here's how: the wealthy get to decide who receives their spending, and those people in turn decide how strongly to weight their suppliers' votes in the allocation of resources. This perpetuates through in a cycle that reaches a very rough, shifting equilibrium that very much resembles Google's "pagerank", IMO.
Compared with outright hierarchy, this kind of inequality is still going to appear relatively fair, but it doesn't measure up to equally weighted votes. That is, it isn't democratically fair. However, this, or at least some inequality appears to be essential to making useful discrimination, if you're going to use the "intelligence" of the web itself to do it. Ideally, the results would be based upon the quality of the content itself, no matter how obscure, but the artificial intelligence required to do that would be mind-boggling.
Besides, people often want to find something that they were surfing the other day (ie. relatively more likely to be strongly linked), or else read up on what others are talking about, so that they need the same points of reference... An objectively better site might actually be inferior for socialising with one's peers, or engaging in political tribal virtual warfare: a third point of reference in such cases leaves you out of the discussion!
Re:An example of poor Google performance (Score:5, Interesting)
- Effective (but switchable) web spam filtering, as parent mentions.
- The ability to search for strings like "-x flags" (note the quotes) and actually get meaningful results.
- More complex patterns (mathematical expressions, anyone?)
- Sort search results by the date pages were modified, they were discovered by Google? (useful in circumstances when you're looking for the latest information on a topic).
- Semantic sensitive search bots.
- Better results for filetype: operator. Why can't Google index all major filetypes even if it can't make them searcheable?
Anyone got any others?
Google could be working constantly behind the scenes on their engine but perhaps they should start making more noise about it. When was the last time Google's web search engine trod some new ground? Or any search engine for that matter (I refer to Google because they are 'innovating' so much).
Re:Hardly Egalitarian (Score:3, Interesting)
So... what's your point?
It's also not Egalitarian because Egalitarianism assumes all people are equal, so company of 100,000 employees is 10,000 more important than a company of 10 employees.
Except corporations are legal entities in their own right (hell, some courts even grant them human rights!) and therefore only count as one, and not as the sum of theiur employees. That's always assuming you want to analyse the matter from the corporate perspective. Personally, I don't think is the most useful approach.
Think in terms of people who want to find the web pages best suited to their requirements (as opposed to the narrow range of pages the cartels want to push) and you'll find those individuals have much freer access to the information they seek. Similarly, consider the individuals who publish the web pages and who have a greater chance of having their pages read when people search using Google. I think you'll find Google an egalitarian influence from both those perspectives,
It's more like positive discrimination, you discriminate against big companies for your own benefit and pretend its for some greater moral purpose.
Bizzarre. Weren't you earlier defending the right of a company to run it's own business as best suits its business model? Or does that only apply when other corporations can pay money to distort the listings to their own gain? Anyway, it's like the corporate shills are always saying: they're free to set up their own engine and take their advertising revenue elsewhere.