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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

#61

Post by bemmu »

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?

With the amount of money at stake with even a 0.1% improvement to search quality, I must assume that every possible correlation against data they can gather is investigated.

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

#62

Post by eurleif »

ridiculous_fish wrote: post #59

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…

You're assuming total search volume will stay constant regardless of quality. But if people don't expect to find things of value as easily, they won't search for as many things. Not worth sorting through a bunch of crappy results.

I'm sure Google knows that its value is based on the Web's value.

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

#63

Post by moonchrome »

Estragon wrote: post #7

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…

Internet Amway ?

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

#65

Post by ridiculous_fish »

eurleif wrote: post #62
ridiculous_fish wrote: post #59

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…

You're assuming total search volume will stay constant regardless of quality. But if people don't expect to find things of value as easily, they won't search for as many things. Not worth sorting through a bunch of crappy results. I'm sure Google knows that its value is based on the Web's value.

True. There's a Laffer Curve of Search with a revenue-optimizing level of suck somewhere between 0% and 100%.

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

#66

Post by daenz »

samstave wrote: post #17
Estragon wrote: post #7

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…

> He was working on a scheme to get people to recommend things to their friends in return for discounts on those things." KILL IT WITH FIRE!

This is what our brilliant minds work on, because they're chasing that damn dollar.

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

#67

Post by mindslight »

Estragon wrote: post #7

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…

It's occurred to me that the ultimate answer is embodied by the classic Feynman chapter title "You just ask them".

You've got Facebook raising money at over $50 per user based on the promise of futureperfect GMO (ie trying to imitate organic) targeted advertising. Google is so worried, they're gutting their core strength and namesake to become more 'social' by facilitating pop culture, as if it were hard to find. Clearly everyone on the web wishes they were buying things all the time, but just doesn't know it yet.

Meanwhile, Pinterest comes along and stumbles into creating a community where people curate pictures, many of stuff they desire to buy either now or in the future - inherently social status symbols. They skip ads, double-down on their ability to drive sales, and directly monetize affiliate links.

It seems like "Fail fast" has a corollary of "Context is king" - If you end up with all of the cat-picture-posting users in the world, and that's what users view your site as being for, you're never going to have better monetization than generic ads.

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

#68

Post by mindslight »

daenz wrote: post #66
samstave wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He was working on a scheme to get people to recommend things to their friends in return for discounts on those things." KILL IT WITH FIRE!

This is what our brilliant minds work on, because they're chasing that damn dollar.

You can never fully escape economics, but I think a better way of looking at it is overemphasizing micro-optimization while being stuck in a small local maximum.

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

#69

Post by InclinedPlane »

mindslight wrote: post #67
Estragon wrote: post #7

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…

It's occurred to me that the ultimate answer is embodied by the classic Feynman chapter title "You just ask them". You've got Facebook raising money at over $50 per user based on the promise of futureperfect GMO (ie trying to imitate organic) targeted advertising. Google is so worried, they're gutting their core strength and namesake to become more 'social' by facilitating pop culture, as if it were hard to find. Cle…

Exactly. Advertising works least well when it's spam, slightly better when it's targeted, and best of all when it's a personal endorsement from someone you trust. When Alton Brown tells you to buy Shun knives or when Penny Arcade tells you to play SW:TOR that has a lot more impact than a random ad for wicker furniture or what-have-you.

That's something that google and facebook are working towards but perhaps they are working too indirectly.

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

#70

Post by InclinedPlane »

anonymoushn wrote: post #36
Estragon wrote: post #7

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?"

That's small compared to the problem of arbitrage in such a scheme. Start by spamming people to buy something which gives them the largest dollar value discount on an item they don't actually want, then sell part of the discount to someone who wants it and pocket the profit.
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