41–50 of 84 posts
Not sure it would be legal, but I would put a significant amount of devs onto predicting stocks. A blog goes more silent or people start Googling for "what is fraud, exactly?" from IPs known to contain lots of IBM workers (that would be more on the illegal end for sure). Obviously a lawyer would need to review every input, but they have access to machine learning and data so much so that they could rock the exchanges…
>What you could do if you were Google and had their databases? Try to predict election results and then try to influence them. Not exactly "Do no evil" I'll admit. Imagine what Google PR could do for politicians with access to what people are talking about, watching, browsing and chatting about in their social network. With their Ad technology they're already half way there.
Depends on who they're backing, right?
But even then, that's subjective. What's more evil, abortion or forced transvaginal ultrasound? Pollution, or unemployment? Kang or Kodos?
Interesting, but I don't think Google wanted to go social to decrease the damages of link spamming. People already do social network spamming. There are plenty of sites where you can pay for a certain number of +1's or likes. Using a combination of inputs, social interaction, page links, keywords, they can achieve a better overall ranking algorithm, which is probably one reason they wanted to go social. However I thi…
Not all +1's are created equal. A +1 from a close friend, or a respected public figure is worth a lot more than ten thousand +1's from accounts created in the past 48 hours from a Bangalore IP address.
Interesting, but I don't think Google wanted to go social to decrease the damages of link spamming. People already do social network spamming. There are plenty of sites where you can pay for a certain number of +1's or likes. Using a combination of inputs, social interaction, page links, keywords, they can achieve a better overall ranking algorithm, which is probably one reason they wanted to go social. However I thi…
> People already do social network spamming. There are plenty of sites where you can pay for a certain number of +1's or likes. Not all +1's are created equal. A +1 from a close friend, or a respected public figure is worth a lot more than ten thousand +1's from accounts created in the past 48 hours from a Bangalore IP address.
I recently attended a talk at Cornell by a guy who is due to start working at Google soon. He had not started working there, but presumably he was hired on the basis of the work he described, and he was explicitly interested in applying his framework to the Google social network. He was working on a scheme to get people to recommend things to their friends in return for discounts on those things. His central focus wa…
Is there a reasonable means to prevent people from spamming their friends to get the discount and then saying over some more trusted channel "Please disregard the spam, I haven't tried this thing and don't know whether it is good yet?"
Originally, link analysis was based on a simple observation: people were maintaining curated lists of bookmarks in their personal webpages, because before search engines it was the only way to remember relevant webpages; I'm sure that most people remember that every personal site had a "my bookmarks" webpage. Therefore, every link counted as a "vote" from that person to a page.
Altavista exploited this by ranking by the number of inlinks. It wasn't long until people figured out that this is very easy to game, so someone came up with the idea of "transitive influence": a site is influent if another influent site votes for it. Algorithms such as PageRank and HITS solved the spam problem.
However, with the evolution of the web, the meaning of links changed. For example, most links are automatically generated by CMSs. Also, there is more and more ephemeral information on the web, and for ephemeral information as soon as you have enough links to it to evaluate its quality, the information is already old and irrelevant.
Luckily, if you are the most used search engine, you have another important popularity signal, which is given by your users: the number of clicks to a page for a given query.
In fact, in today's search engines I would say that the influence of link analysis is smaller and smaller in the overall ranking, and probably done mostly at the domain level rather than for each single page.
However, with the advent of social networks, a large amount of clicks doesn't come from search engines anymore, but from social "shares". Which means that the search engine can not observe them anymore, losing a precious signal of popularity (together with "Like"s and "+1"s).
I'm not sure if this is what Google is after with Google+, but most probably the click and share data on Google+ affects (or will affect) the search rankings.
I recently attended a talk at Cornell by a guy who is due to start working at Google soon. He had not started working there, but presumably he was hired on the basis of the work he described, and he was explicitly interested in applying his framework to the Google social network. He was working on a scheme to get people to recommend things to their friends in return for discounts on those things. His central focus wa…
This work sounds interesting. Who was the talk by? It sounds like a student of Jon Kleinberg but I quick glance over his publications didn't reveal work on that kind of mechanism design problem.
http://events.cornell.edu/event/orie_colloquium_yaron_singer...
I think this is what jaques is trying to say: page-rank's design is open to being gamed which has led to an arms race of algorithm tweaks. A social graph has much more powerful signals for figuring out relevant search results. this isn't a hypothesis. the first iteration is called "search plus your world" and everybody already knows about it.
But this no longer works because the original indicators of authority have died out as the web has become less of a network, since search enables everything to exist in isolation (at one of my work sites we just trimmed the majority of the links from our site).
But if you can determine which people have authority, then you can use their browsing habits in order to allocate authority to websites again. Instead of website having and giving authority, you start giving an authority (per topic) score to users, and then use their behaviour to determine authority in pages.
This last aspect is, I think, what jacques is pointing out, and its not that the social graph gives relevant results (which as you say, everyone knows about), but that it gives a different mechanism for authority (which yields better relevance).