A search engine built by the crowd
blog.archify.com
A search engine built by the crowd
1–10 of 56 posts
Re: A search engine built by the crowd
#2Making search human again.
Re: A search engine built by the crowd
#3This algorightm might highly impact discoverability. It gives mover visibility to already popular websites making them even popular, while not very well known websites will never be discovered because very few people spend time on them.
Also I don't like the idea of having to install a plugin on my browser so that the urls I visit and how much time I spent on them is tracked, even if suposedly my identity is never tracked. Once the plugin is installed how can I know if a new version of the plugin won't track more parameters?
When I read the title I though it was referring to a distributed search engine like YacY or Seeks.
Re: A search engine built by the crowd
#4I think this is a great idea! However, I am worried about privacy. I also feel like this algorithm may inflate the importance of certain types of content over others. For example, just because I spend more time on a news or social media website does not mean that it has higher quality content, it just means that the content takes longer to consume. Within content categories, however, I think this could do a good job of weeding out the quality content from the spam.
Re: A search engine built by the crowd
#5It's sad to think that, with Google Analytics, Google probably has this data point already available for a lot of pages without having to ask people to install stuff.
Re: A search engine built by the crowd
#6I was a little surprised that they haven't included anything about spam or gamification. One core advantage of pagerank is that it's (relatively) hard to get links from high-authority websites. I can't force whithouse.gov or cnn.com to link to me. If you rely on time-spent-on-page from millions of users and treat everyone equally, how to you stop spammers from faking millions of hours spent reading their content using spoofing or bots?
Re: A search engine built by the crowd
#7It needs some sort of fallback for search results or it's useless to a specialized user. My Google search history looks like random bits of consciousness spread out across months. Half of those search terms bring 0 results on Blippex, and while I understand that they're early, it's hard to beat something like PageRank when it's already got established experience.
It's a catch 22: the results won't get better unless people use the service, but people aren't going to use it if the results are bad in the first place. If I install the extension but use Google, it's a one-way relationship that only they get data out of. Not very good for me.
Re: A search engine built by the crowd
#8I had a similar idea in college which was to take the actual traffic for pages into account for search ranking (this was before Google bought whatever Analytics had been called before, I can't remember.) I had thought of it as a server side app which would benefit the hosts while feeding the search engine traffic data.
After talking with friends we explored the idea of a user side traffic tracking app as a way to feed the search engine, but I couldn't get enough traction and no one wanted to challenge not only Google but also IE/Firefox/Safari etc. because we felt it would be its own browser.
Alas.
Now a days I am more concerned about possible privacy issues, I feel for them launching a search engine that actively asks you to be tracked (even if anonymously), it's a hard sell during this current resistance to that entire idea.
Re: A search engine built by the crowd
#9I'm sorry for the offtopic, but on a page that's supposed to get people involved, shouldn't you at least mind the difference between its and it's? In the very first paragraph it goes wrong already. I'm not a native English speaker, but these mistakes always jump out for some reason.
Re: A search engine built by the crowd
#10Doesn't work at all without cookies. Meaning, it doesn't work, and doesn't tell you why. If you're targeting people who are looking for an alternative to the major search engines, there's a better-than-average chance that they'll have cookies disabled.