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It's interesting that PageRank's measure of quality is entirely dependent on there being a community that recognizes the quality of the content first, before th

by adriand 16y ago

It's interesting that PageRank's measure of quality is entirely dependent on there being a community that recognizes the quality of the content first, before the search engine. Without a community, you're not going to get incoming links. In other words, work produced by lonely geniuses is quite likely to go unnoticed. For all we know, the content that is being produced by companies like Demand Media has already been produced by thoughtful people, writing at length about subjects they love on obscure websites that no one ever links to. What a shame that would be!

dejb 16y ago
> In other words, work produced by lonely geniuses is quite likely to go unnoticed. I think this is something that has happened throughout history. The web probably makes it easier for the their work to be uncover than before but they are still at a disadvantage.
moultano 16y ago
I've actually seen that happen to one of the lead engineers in search quality at Google. He'd written a great guide to ultralight backpacking that until I linked to it, wasn't indexed by any major search engines. http://eric-and-april.com/Ultralight/index.html http://eric-and-april.com/Ultralight/index.html
- ovi256 16y ago
  Is this a meta-post ? Did you just link to it for the first time ?
ugh 16y ago
In other words, work produced by lonely geniuses is quite likely to go unnoticed. It’s not quite as depressing as that. I recently made a quaint little site for a band and it has exactly zero other sites linking to it. It’s the first result when you search for the name of the band (which is town-name+generic-term-used-in-bandnames). This only works with stuff that’s rare on the web, though. If there were other bands with the same name and if someone linked to them my little website would probably get swamped. (The same would presumably happen if someone were to write a blog post about the band – say, a scathing review of their last gig – and if that one post gets only a handful of links. Hm, so getting a few links seems at least like a good defense in such cases. Luckily many of the band’s target demographic aren’t actually all that internet savvy :)
fnid2 16y ago
You imply that works of geniuses should be noticed, but geniuses are so esoteric, rare, and difficult to understand that most wouldn't notice. Since the majority of people don't care about what geniuses care about, it's unlikely they'll appreciate it enough to link to it. If they do link to it, then it's "they" are probably a very small population of people, maybe a handful of other geniuses themselves. The google page rank algorithm is designed in such a way that the work of geniuses should go unnoticed. Pagerank is designed for the masses. For the masses of consumers specifically. Google is not designed for the geniuses. It's designed for people who want what everyone else wants. In the beginning, when google was a tool used primarily by geniuses, then geniuses were the community. They were the masses that used google. Their algorithms now pick selections from a new community. Bloggers who can copy/paste. Bloggers with lots of friends who will link to their posts because the friends are asked to and because other friends reciprocate. Google doesn't know if you are linking to a web page because you like the web page or because someone who built the web page asked you to link to it or because you are getting paid. And google doesn't care.
Gormo 16y ago
The content produced by Demand Media is still spam, all the more effective as spam to the extent that it approximates thoughtful but obscure content. The problem is that "indistinguishable" does not mean "identical". The Optimization-by-Proxy concept also applies to the way we recognize useful content and distinguish it from spam: if spam-creators exploit the gap between our perception of content and the actual quality of the content, they will ultimately create spam that fools even savvy users, and we will be influenced by it without even realizing it. One of the characters in Neal Stephenson's "Anathem" described this phenomenon, occurring on his world's equivalent of the internet: sophisticated AI had led to spam (or "crap" as he called it) which was created by taking perfectly valid, reasonable ideas, combining them with falsehoods or biased information expressed clearly and reasonably, and releasing it in the form of real, substantive communications between users. A great deal of time and energy had to go into sorting "crap" from valid information.

by adriand 16y ago

dejb 16y ago

> In other words, work produced by lonely geniuses is quite likely to go unnoticed. I think this is something that has happened throughout history. The web probably makes it easier for the their work to be uncover than before but they are still at a disadvantage.

moultano 16y ago

I've actually seen that happen to one of the lead engineers in search quality at Google. He'd written a great guide to ultralight backpacking that until I linked to it, wasn't indexed by any major search engines. http://eric-and-april.com/Ultralight/index.html http://eric-and-april.com/Ultralight/index.html

ovi256 16y ago
Is this a meta-post ? Did you just link to it for the first time ?

ugh 16y ago

In other words, work produced by lonely geniuses is quite likely to go unnoticed. It’s not quite as depressing as that. I recently made a quaint little site for a band and it has exactly zero other sites linking to it. It’s the first result when you search for the name of the band (which is town-name+generic-term-used-in-bandnames). This only works with stuff that’s rare on the web, though. If there were other bands with the same name and if someone linked to them my little website would probably get swamped. (The same would presumably happen if someone were to write a blog post about the band – say, a scathing review of their last gig – and if that one post gets only a handful of links. Hm, so getting a few links seems at least like a good defense in such cases. Luckily many of the band’s target demographic aren’t actually all that internet savvy :)

fnid2 16y ago

You imply that works of geniuses should be noticed, but geniuses are so esoteric, rare, and difficult to understand that most wouldn't notice. Since the majority of people don't care about what geniuses care about, it's unlikely they'll appreciate it enough to link to it. If they do link to it, then it's "they" are probably a very small population of people, maybe a handful of other geniuses themselves. The google page rank algorithm is designed in such a way that the work of geniuses should go unnoticed. Pagerank is designed for the masses. For the masses of consumers specifically. Google is not designed for the geniuses. It's designed for people who want what everyone else wants. In the beginning, when google was a tool used primarily by geniuses, then geniuses were the community. They were the masses that used google. Their algorithms now pick selections from a new community. Bloggers who can copy/paste. Bloggers with lots of friends who will link to their posts because the friends are asked to and because other friends reciprocate. Google doesn't know if you are linking to a web page because you like the web page or because someone who built the web page asked you to link to it or because you are getting paid. And google doesn't care.

Gormo 16y ago

The content produced by Demand Media is still spam, all the more effective as spam to the extent that it approximates thoughtful but obscure content. The problem is that "indistinguishable" does not mean "identical". The Optimization-by-Proxy concept also applies to the way we recognize useful content and distinguish it from spam: if spam-creators exploit the gap between our perception of content and the actual quality of the content, they will ultimately create spam that fools even savvy users, and we will be influenced by it without even realizing it. One of the characters in Neal Stephenson's "Anathem" described this phenomenon, occurring on his world's equivalent of the internet: sophisticated AI had led to spam (or "crap" as he called it) which was created by taking perfectly valid, reasonable ideas, combining them with falsehoods or biased information expressed clearly and reasonably, and releasing it in the form of real, substantive communications between users. A great deal of time and energy had to go into sorting "crap" from valid information.