[Search-l] NPOV for Search?

[Bryan Bishop]

Multiple emails answered below, for the sake of consolidation.

On Wednesday 09 January 2008, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> 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.

I disagree entirely. Look at all the wonderful support you've been 
getting on this mailing list. People really, really, genuinely want to 
help out, and I've seen a few programmers step up and say they'd like 
the API so they can go code a component or two, but the infrastructure 
for open community "mashups" just simply doesn't exist. But it's 
something that can be added in, maybe, a week. (OK, I honestly have no 
idea how clean the code is.)

> 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.

That's one possible use. I think many (legit) uses can be found for it.
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On Wednesday 09 January 2008, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Agree or Disagree with the following statements:
> -- Yahoo should return positive websites about political candidates
> that Yahoo management likes and negative websites about candidates
> they don't like
>
> -- Yahoo should return only positive websites about Barack Obama, and
> push all the criticism to the next page, because Barack is popular
> and people like him
>
> -- Yahoo should return a balanced set of options for searches on
> political candidates, including some which are positive, some which
> are negative, and some which are neutral.  The important thing is
> that they be of good quality: informative in some fashion to the end
> user.
>
> My guess is that for almost everyone, the third option is more what
> we think about, when we think about quality search results.

But each of those ... assumes Yahoo Management is the source of the 
non-neutrality, and that's not true at all. I am certain they are there 
in good intentions and are mostly neutral. But that doesn't change the 
nature of their search engine -- which is where the POV comes in. The 
email response about Yahoo MindSet demonstrated what I am talking about 
quite well, and I am impressed that Yahoo developers have taken that 
opportunity for improvement.
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On Wednesday 09 January 2008, Jimmy Wales wrote (re: MPOV):
> Now I do agree with this statement... I do think that it is possible
> to have many niche search engines, hopefully they will proliferate if
> our software is good... and I think that's a good thing overall.
>
> But Wikia will not be a niche search engine, and I think as a key
> part of the infrastructure, we want to strive to be neutral, neutral,
> neutral.

Actually, I was thinking of it more as an enabling platfrom of 
neutrality - from which - greater selectivity could be chosen from by 
the user, to enhance their searching experience.

Thus the social network, the opinions and trust.

Thus the selection algorithms and the ability to plug-and-play (not yet)

> Search results should ideally be balanced, with a sensible variety of
> results depending on what the searcher is looking for.

Yes. The searcher is looking for something specific. 
________________________________________

Jimbo, in another email you wrote that Wikia Search should be like 
journalism. Fair and balanced. This is just like cultural relativism, 
kind of like saying we should teach both creationism and evolution in 
the class room. Or like the journalist that would write about the 
cosmos when a new research team observes the sky, and have to include 
astrology to be 'fair and balanced'. Journalists (at least the good 
ones) are notorious for their understanding of the inability to get the 
complete, total picture -- indeed this goes into some deep philosophy 
about Godel and set theory etc. etc.  See my comments about being an 
enabling platform.

Jimbo, on second thought I have realized that what I am saying here 
amounts to trying to convert ** Jimmy Wales ** (of all people) into 
some sort of subjective understanding of POV and search and selection 
algorithms, that there is no universal standard (unless you want social 
darwinism or authorative NPOV for all users to adopt upon searching), 
and I am very sure that thousands have tried before on Wikipedia. But 
Wikipedia and a search engine are two very different projects, so 
that's why I still have some hope.

BTW - all of this amounts to a plea to allow innovation from the crowds. 
That it centers around MPOV/NPOV is just coincidence, and really by 
letting developers add on modules, you're eliminating any POV bias in 
your search engine.

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