[Search-l] [canonizers] Fwd: Re: NPOV for Search? (was: Seth on moderation)

[Bryan Bishop]

On 2008-01-08, Brent Allsop <brent.allsop at canonizer.com> wrote:
> Tell me more about this conversation, and this email list.  What have
> they been talking about?

Well, the email list is about the new search project, Wikia Search. 
Jimmy Wales wants to expose the distributed crawling project known as 
grub to the open source community and, at the same time, expose an 
interface to searching through the distributed crawling project, which 
just-so-happens to be Wikia Search. Additionally, all of the tools to 
make the whole site happen are open source. They are even going to be 
doing an "open index" so that they can transfer their snapshots of the 
web to other interested parties, re: the Atlas architecture plans which 
are also on their website.

> And since we haven't told much of anybody outside of transhumanist
> circles about the Canonizer, will they know what you mean when you
> say "The Canonizer might [want] in on this."?

Somewhat. It struck me immediately that when they started talking about 
NPOV, or neutral point of view, that search and NPOV *do not* go 
together. There's no way that you can be neutral when you are 
searching. You're crawling contexts, you have opinions, you want to 
find other opinions. 

After all. The scoring algorithm on the search engine *demands* that it 
is no longer a neutral point of view. That's the entire idea of ranking 
in the first place. So they can't say they want NPOV. ;)

Built right into Wikia Search is a mini 'social network' where people 
can choose to trust each other and their related social searches and so 
on, kind of like the 'lijit' project except everything is cached on the 
local servers (lijit searches the "social networking websites" for an 
author's data, for the author's reader's if the author is running a 
blog or something). This, is obviously the trust model that the 
Canonizer has been suggesting for some time.

The Canonizer, for those on the Wikia Search mailing list, allows users 
to support canonized opinions in relation to other opinions and trust 
users to support their views on other topics, so it's like a massive 
hierarchical data structure that (1) has a social graph and (2) polls 
its users. Integration with Wikia Search would mean users can find what 
they are looking for, find who they are looking for, and work towards 
finding (searching) for solutions to contrary opinions or just finding 
increasingly niched information.

> If you've been spending time discussing this on lists with Jimbo and
> such, I hope you'll keep me informed

Absolutely. I am sending this to the Wikia Search list as well. Maybe 
you would like to join it? 

- Bryan
________________________________________
Bryan Bishop
http://heybryan.org/