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I'm not convinced that it would - is there a qualitative difference between page 2-3 or even pages 1-10 of Google results and the first results on page 1? A ran
by grey-area 12y ago
I'm not convinced that it would - is there a qualitative difference between page 2-3 or even pages 1-10 of Google results and the first results on page 1? A random mix of the first 10 pages of results say I'd say would be more interesting than their current mostly static and gamed results, which are basically pay to play.
The most valuable thing about this idea is that it is immune to gaming because of the mixing. Just as an example relevant to the point of the original article, here is a search for hotels in Devon on google:
https://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=hotels%20in%20devon https://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=hotels%20in%20devon
First half of the page are links to Google places entries - so advertising for Google. Are these paid for? I'm not sure what the situation is there but this is partly a manual intervention from Google to try to save their results... After that on page 1 we have lots of aggregator/review sites like laterooms, tripadvisor, stayindevon etc (your results may vary). by the second page of results we have some real hotels, by the third, we have more real hotels, etc, up to page 9, which is still real hotels in devon.
So I'd say the first 10 pages are pretty much equally useful, and some mixing of results would do wonders for ranking and allow good results to surface instead of languishing unless they make an entry on a google property, or on one of the portals.
- coriny 12y agoI like your idea. A small amount of randomisation can be very effective at (1) defeating gaming, (2) finding unexpected signals in complex systems (3) Preventing over-fitting of results when optimising. All three of these advantages come into play here.
- RichardDHH 12y agoGood analysis
- yongjik 12y agoWithout going into too much details, just randomly mixing the first ten result in the first page will totally destroy Google's results: anyone will notice in a matter of days, if not hours. And everyone will find Bing so much objectively better that it wouldn't even be funny. For example, "rosetta spacecraft": the first two results are from ESA's homepage, the tenth is an article from The Guardian. "mauna kea weather": after a gigantic weather box, the first result is from Mauna Kea Weather Center, the tenth is a page from some generic website that deals with all mountains. And on and on.
- grey-area 12y agoWithout going into too much details, just randomly mixing the first ten result in the first page will totally destroy Google's results I didn't suggest doing that.