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What you could do if you were Google and had their databases

jacquesmattheij.com

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Re: What you could do if you were Google and had their databases

#51

Post by euroclydon »

dustingetz wrote: post #38

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.

Google, in many cases because of GA, knows a users behavior once they reach a site. I wonder if they take into consideration, how long a user stays on a site they find in search or how active they are at that site, when ranking search results? Wouldn't these metrics be an indicator of quality?

Re: What you could do if you were Google and had their databases

#52

Post by PaulHoule »

dustingetz wrote: post #38

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.

the worse "unintended consequence" so far hasn't been the proliferation of crappy links but the disappearance of useful links. anybody who could give you a link knows (1) it's a valuable commodity and (2) it detracts from their rankings.

Paid links wouldn't be such a problem if there were more free links.

Re: What you could do if you were Google and had their databases

#53

Post by alecco »

opendomain wrote: post #40
alecco wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

P(tongue-in-cheek) == .5

Um - no. I was entirely serious about curing cancer. I even did a speech at the NY Tech Council on it - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud1x6VYEc1Q I believe we can only solve out big problmes by using big data - please do not down vote me

Repliers can't downvote parent comment. Or at least not within my HN user level.

Your comment sounds like generated out of HN headlines mixed with wishful thinking. How could web data "cure cancer"? Are you indirectly calling the huge amounts of cancer researchers idiots for looking in the wrong place? Please think before you post.

Re: What you could do if you were Google and had their databases

#54

Post by vibrunazo »

euroclydon wrote: post #51
dustingetz wrote: post #38

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.

Google, in many cases because of GA, knows a users behavior once they reach a site. I wonder if they take into consideration, how long a user stays on a site they find in search or how active they are at that site, when ranking search results? Wouldn't these metrics be an indicator of quality?

According to Dan Sullivan's periodic table, they do measure that. And it has a weight of "2" according to his model. See the "Ce" tag:

http://searchengineland.com/seotable

Re: What you could do if you were Google and had their databases

#55

Post by jfno67 »

euroclydon wrote: post #51
dustingetz wrote: post #38

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.

Google, in many cases because of GA, knows a users behavior once they reach a site. I wonder if they take into consideration, how long a user stays on a site they find in search or how active they are at that site, when ranking search results? Wouldn't these metrics be an indicator of quality?

They do say they check if the same user by cookie or logged in is back on Google within a short amount of time. This would mean the site was a poor fit for the query. It is an indicator of the quality of the result for this query and for this user. They never mentioned using Google Analytics, maybe they do too.

Re: What you could do if you were Google and had their databases

#57

Post by jrockway »

brown9-2 wrote: post #56

Reminds me of Cory Doctorow's (fictional) short story Scroogled: http://www.radaronline.com/from-the-magazine/2007/09/google_...

The story where it's Google's fault that a new government took over that made pretty much every past, present, and future action illegal.

Re: What you could do if you were Google and had their databases

#58

Post by jrockway »

abraham wrote: post #37
3pt14159 wrote: post #10

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…

Google is already predicting flu trends. I imagine that could be modified for stocks or just about anything else. http://www.google.org/flutrends/

Using search data to predict public health issues is legal and good PR. Using search data to trade on insider information is illegal and bad PR. That's why we do the flu thing and not the stock thing :)

Re: What you could do if you were Google and had their databases

#59

Post by ridiculous_fish »

It may be that the web has rotted in the way described, so that it takes longer for users to find what they want. But I would argue this dynamic actually benefits Google: searching takes longer, so users spend more time using Google's services.

So there's this perverse incentive to make search as crappy as possible, right up to the limit where users switch to another search engine. And the great thing about this "web rot" (from Google's perspective) is that it affects all search engines, so users won't switch.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that Google is intentionally pursuing this "crapification" strategy, but they may not worry about the web rot as much as the author thinks, at least in the short term.

But while decreasing search result relevance may be neutral or even beneficial, increasing ad relevance is a big benefit for Google. And that is where social comes in: it allows for more targeted ads.

Re: What you could do if you were Google and had their databases

#60

Post by cinquemb »

Maybe, just maybe we can expect more from future internet companies. facebook and twitter seem to be in the right direction. but i think actually MAKING something that is USEFUL to whoever your trying to make money off, not whatever BS g+ is playing at.

Before i was even into programming i was into making. take heed google sheeps.

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