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Google bases their actions on dry information harvested from people. Human science does not exist without statistics, and statistics requires you to make assump

Google bases their actions on dry information harvested from people. Human science does not exist without statistics, and statistics requires you to make assumptions. Google can analyze me till kingdom come, it cannot correctly predict what I prefer at a certain moment in time. And as for big companies making documented assumptions, check what Facebook rolled out today in their news feed. In situations where user preference is key, the only option is to leave the decision to the individual user. I don't mind if Google implements this and offers it as a service to their users, but deciding based on dry statistics is never good, it leaves people frustrated and makes it impossible for authors to properly implement a spec like this.

robrenaud 15y ago
I work on localsearch ranking at Google, but this I don't know anything about Google's use of this information in web search, nor am I speaking for Google. This is about the philosophy of how we approach problems in ranking. The appropriate question is not, "is this going to work everytime?". If that was the question, basically no one would make progress in web search ever. The web is littered with randomness and corner cases. The question is, "is this a a generally good heuristic, will it help more than it hurts, and can we detect when the heuristic fails badly?" I am guessing that if this prev/next information is used, it will be to boost the front page of an article that has SOME support for the query over the second or third or n'th page of an article that has more, but not exceptionally more support for the query. Don't think of this as a hard if, but more like an additional weight in a summed comparison that biases towards the first page over later pages in a sequence.