[Search-l] NPOV for Search?

[Jimmy Wales]

Matthew Silvey wrote:
> You will be forcing every user into the perspective of whatever set of, 
> transparent I hope, rules govern rank in results.  For instance not 
> everyone might agree that a candidate running for President of the USA 
> should have the link to their self-promotional site rank above the site 
> related to a currently held public office.  I assume the driving point 
> in all of this should be that we make the rules as visible and 
> accessible as possible first.

Not just visible and accessible, but also participatory.

And, just as an aside, I am totally down with individualized 
cusomization but I think that's a job for the distant future.

The point of the social network is not (immediately) to allow the users 
to customize their search experience... I expect we will have far far 
fewer people actually using the social network than we have using the 
search engine.

The point of the social network is to make more explicit the kind of 
trust relationships that are implicit in a traditional wiki setting, so 
that these relationships can be used algorithmically to weed out 
spammers and so on.

--Jimbo