4 ms·

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 m

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.

zipdog 15y ago
I think you're missing an important piece in your summary. The original page-rank algorithm was based around the idea of authority. A site might contain content entirely relevant to your query for cancer, but if it has no authority then its probably not what you're looking for. But this no longer works because the original indicators of authority have died out as the web has become less of a network, since search enables everything to exist in isolation (at one of my work sites we just trimmed the majority of the links from our site). But if you can determine which people have authority, then you can use their browsing habits in order to allocate authority to websites again. Instead of website having and giving authority, you start giving an authority (per topic) score to users, and then use their behaviour to determine authority in pages. This last aspect is, I think, what jacques is pointing out, and its not that the social graph gives relevant results (which as you say, everyone knows about), but that it gives a different mechanism for authority (which yields better relevance).
euroclydon 15y ago
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?
- vibrunazo 15y ago
  According to Dan Sullivan's periodic table, they do measure that. And it has a weight of "2" according to his model. See the "Ce" tag: http://searchengineland.com/seotable http://searchengineland.com/seotable
- jfno67 15y ago
  They do say they check if the same user by cookie or logged in is back on Google within a short amount of time. This would mean the site was a poor fit for the query. It is an indicator of the quality of the result for this query and for this user. They never mentioned using Google Analytics, maybe they do too.
- bemmu 15y ago
  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.
PaulHoule 15y ago
the worse "unintended consequence" so far hasn't been the proliferation of crappy links but the disappearance of useful links. anybody who could give you a link knows (1) it's a valuable commodity and (2) it detracts from their rankings. Paid links wouldn't be such a problem if there were more free links.

zipdog 15y ago

I think you're missing an important piece in your summary. The original page-rank algorithm was based around the idea of authority. A site might contain content entirely relevant to your query for cancer, but if it has no authority then its probably not what you're looking for. But this no longer works because the original indicators of authority have died out as the web has become less of a network, since search enables everything to exist in isolation (at one of my work sites we just trimmed the majority of the links from our site). But if you can determine which people have authority, then you can use their browsing habits in order to allocate authority to websites again. Instead of website having and giving authority, you start giving an authority (per topic) score to users, and then use their behaviour to determine authority in pages. This last aspect is, I think, what jacques is pointing out, and its not that the social graph gives relevant results (which as you say, everyone knows about), but that it gives a different mechanism for authority (which yields better relevance).

euroclydon 15y ago

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?

vibrunazo 15y ago
According to Dan Sullivan's periodic table, they do measure that. And it has a weight of "2" according to his model. See the "Ce" tag: http://searchengineland.com/seotable http://searchengineland.com/seotable
jfno67 15y ago
They do say they check if the same user by cookie or logged in is back on Google within a short amount of time. This would mean the site was a poor fit for the query. It is an indicator of the quality of the result for this query and for this user. They never mentioned using Google Analytics, maybe they do too.
bemmu 15y ago
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.

PaulHoule 15y ago

the worse "unintended consequence" so far hasn't been the proliferation of crappy links but the disappearance of useful links. anybody who could give you a link knows (1) it's a valuable commodity and (2) it detracts from their rankings. Paid links wouldn't be such a problem if there were more free links.