[Search-l] NPOV for Search?

[Bryan Bishop]

On Tuesday 08 January 2008, Alex Halavais wrote:
> On Jan 8, 2008 10:37 PM, John McCormac <jmcc at hackwatch.com> wrote:
> > The social aspect of search is that it may provide some guidelines
> > as to what the user is searching for. The obvious example is that
> > if I was searching for something Waterford related, I would most
> > probably not be looking for something from Waterford Michigan or
> > anywhere other than Waterford Ireland. Now if that was part of my
> > profile, it could be used to narrow the results. But that might be
> > going a bit too far with social search - taking the user into the
> > search.
>
> I don't see why that would be taking things too far! If everyone you
> have friended on Wikia has followed links relating to Ireland in the
> past, I think it would be perfectly reasonable for the search aengine
> to rank links related to Ireland's Waterford higher. If it turns out

That's interesting. I think that's computationally intensive and perhaps 
somewhat unrequired. It may be easier for communities of developers to 
center around certain topics of interest, like Ireland, and then 
provide additional information to the ranking algorithm for the SE. 
This way, the SE does not have to do background data indexing and 
instead the information can be presented by the developers and the 
communities that want to see it happen. (This way, it *will* happen. 
There just needs to be an open API developed for this to take place, 
one that lets developers drop in different scoring funcs etc.).

> you were being a rebel, and really wanted Michigan links, you would
> quickly re-search with Michigan as a keyword.
>
> I figured that was what the social networking was for :).

There's always the unfortunate case of just band-wagon hopping. :(

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