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I wonder if a standard library or service could be written that detects search engine manipulation, in order to provide a mathematical confidence that it occurr
by zackmorris 7y ago
I wonder if a standard library or service could be written that detects search engine manipulation, in order to provide a mathematical confidence that it occurred of some kind.
So for example, you make metube.com and it shows up on all the search engines. Off the top of my head, maybe it watches the rank over time, kind of like a stock ticker. If Google detects metube.com and buries your listing, but the listing stays the same on more egalitarian search engines like duckduckgo.com, that would show as a divergence in the historical rankings.
So you could get answers like "there's a 77% likelihood that Google buried your link" or "Google's result diverges 23% from other search engines" or something like that.
Then an overall measure of the top million sites or whatever could be used to generate an overall fairness/bias rating.
If it showed enough manipulation over a long enough time, maybe that would be grounds to regulate or break up the largest search engines. Or maybe the law wouldn't be necessary, because a browser plugin could say "there's a 95% chance that this search result has not been manipulated" or even request results with a high degree of manipulation as a way of finding the canonical truth.
Hmmm that gives me an idea for a search engine...
- judge2020 7y agoMight have been possible back in the day, but now the search engine market is just Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo's upcoming crawler (their own bot indexes my website but I'm not certain if it's being used for results). Even Yahoo uses bing for results: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8174763.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8174763.stm https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/16/microsoft-and-yahoo-renew-search-allian/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/16/microsoft-and-yahoo-renew-... You would need to go to the country-specific search engines like Yandex and Baidu, which may not be that great for english or US-based content.