Search Results Based on Your Social Network 59
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."
I don't know about you (Score:5, Insightful)
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]?
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I don't. In fact, I suspect they might all have been usurped by the evil blood-drinking Draco-ians.
Wait, it's me isn't it?
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Re:I don't know about you (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds pretty damned stupid if you ask me.
Re:I don't know about you (Score:4, Insightful)
The advice of critics and strangers, of course. They do not need a search engine to find out what their friends think, they can just talk to them. This strikes me as a way to further estrange people from each other by allowing them to filter out any dissenting views before they should be forced to confront them. Beyond being a dumb idea, it's socially harmful.
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CMDRTaco should have been doing this with Slashdot years ago, he's far too conservative with the features. (hence the rift with Kevin over Digg.) An engine that simply searched Slashdot posts for quality links to sites would boost result quality 100 fold. It's a
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You clearly didn't read the article. What you are describing, however interesting it might be, is not what this project is doing. What this project is doing is rating things associated with my sister highest, my cousin next, my friends next, my co-workers next, m
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The second line to enter my head was a quip from Manhattan.
"Let's do it some strange way that you always wanted do but nobody would do it with you."
"I'm shocked. What kind of talk is that from a kid your age? Well, I'll get my scuba diving equipment..."
The third thing that entered my mind was "dowsing with doodlebugs".
I'm not sure "Delv
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It will also be very popular. People dislike cognitive dissonance more than almost everything else.
That includes you and I. There is so much information out there, each of us has to make do with a miniscule slice of it. That means that even the most accurate and rational worldviews are still
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Oh man (Score:1)
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Re:Oh man (Score:4, Funny)
Terrible idea (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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> enjoys violent flamewars
See, I think it would be wildly popular with people who avoid flamewars in favor of echo chambers.
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That's the Corner Case, Not the Mode (Score:2)
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 "ac
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all my friends are emacs people
Funny, all my friends are vi pre-version 5.x people. I couldn't be friends with someone who uses vim 6.3, let alone vim 7.0! Death to the heretics!
My overly subtle point being, people don't actually tend that much to associate themselves with other people of the same opinion, because too rarely does an opinion about something matter to the point it would determine who you're going to befriend or not with. Except in the case of hippies and religious freaks.
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The only downside is, if TFA is to be believed, this: "once a person builds a profile, he must log in to search, and that identity can no longer be used as a proxy."
If I've read that right, unless you want your employer, spouse, child and/or stalker investigating whatever interests and opinions you may once have had, you'll need to build yourself a profile. But, after that, you w
Things you don't want to know about your friends (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [cliffdwellermagazine.com] 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 [texasmonthly.com]!
Excuse my scepticism (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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I dunno if this is a
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yeah, as an enduser that really su
New excuse to refuse friend requests on facebook (Score:5, Funny)
It's been done. (Score:2)
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 [denounce.com].
Hysteresis of a Social Network (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
What if you're a hermit? (Score:2)
Some better filtering mechanism is needed (Score:2)
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
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I know google has a whole host of algorithms merged to give its results, i can see this being useful as a lower level one, unfortunately i can never see this being CPU efficient, it means that instead of reading a database it has to personally search your web every time you search. I Would like to see it as an extra option tho!
Privacy? (Score:1, Funny)
I look forward to seeing what results it gives to "Jack Thompson -> animal porn" once it gets hacked/spammed, though.
Spelling? (Score:2)
Suggest new people! (Score:4, Funny)
That would be cool if they used your friends and such to suggest you new people to become friends with, à la Last.fm [www.last.fm], with people instead of music.
Well to LastNig.ht [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.
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We've been arguing about that concept here at the office lately. I'm of the opinion that I don't care *who* has similar interests (the last.fm model), I just want to know *what* people with similar interests like (the amazon.com model).
Similarly, I like to think that a lot more goes into the decision of who I'd want to friend than can be divin
inside the box (Score:5, Interesting)
Thanks for making sure they'll never be confronted with the world outside their small box.
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What, you mean unlike the same sort of small world you live in where it's justifiable to call people who disagree with you dumb asses?
I already see this narrow world-view with blogs. People blog about other blogs to the point that they seem to exist for no other reason than to justify their own beliefs.
I'm not saying I agree with people who support Bush. And I do ag
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What, you mean unlike the same sort of small world you live in where it's justifiable to call people who disagree with you dumb asses?
And people who use cheap rhetorical overgeneralisations in order to make a point that ignores the original content, yes. :-)
Like it or not, anyone who believes otherwise probably as a narrow-minded view of the world themselves.
Totally. In fact, it's difficult to get other views, because very few organisations or groups even allow them in. The problem with automation is that it hides the filtering.
Ugh (Score:2)
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?"
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If you also had an account on say Digg (don't flame me) then even without your UID the general "shape" of your profile would pick out.. as well as a thousand others in the same direction... it becomes broad and foc
Newspeak 2.0 - Newthink (Score:2)
That's sort of like ... (Score:2)
Hmm, cousins! (Score:2)
The most influential man in the world (Score:1)
How to trust wisdom of the crowds (Score:1)
Social network search (Score:1)