The Reg : Google and the Great Wikipedia Feedback Loop

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/26/br...a_slaps_google/

Google's Wikidependence is worse than ever. And Jorge Cauz thinks it's time for an intervention.

"If I were to be the CEO of Google or the founders of Google, I would be very [displeased] that the best search engine in the world continues to provide as a first link, Wikipedia," the Encyclopedia Brittanica president told The Sydney Morning Herald last week during a visit Down Under. "Is this the best they can do? Is this the best that [their] algorithm can do?"

I'd like to hear a Google spokesman either confirm or deny that they purposefully promote Wikipedia.

That's extraordinarily unlikely to happen - Google likes to keep its sauce secret.

But it's pretty clear that wikipedia gets a free pass on the Google result page, even where it adds no content. Look at the speed new stubs can make it to #1, with zero inbound links, and alternative results to choose from.

Created about three-and-a-half hours ago, by copying information from a single web page -

- and the web page that got lifted from is relegated to position five:



Quite how wikipedia adds to "the sum of human knowledge" here is beyond me - but Google's bias towards crappy pages like this is the only real reason wikipedia gets so many hits.

Perhaps this is my blonde, but I thought the Google guys and Jimbo were bitter enemies.

One of the things you learn at Stanford is Ethics.

Google may be in competition with Wikipedia in some ways (e.g. Knol), but Google is an outstanding example of a Learning Organization in pursuit of Best Ethical Practices.

Google's Motto ("Don't Be Evil") is a reflection of its pursuit of Best Ethical Practices.

Moulton, you quoted me like you were responding to me, but you didn't say jack in reference to my question. I swear, I click to view your posts maybe once out of every dozen... and it's always a mistake.

De Interpretatione - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaAristotle enumerates the affirmations and denials that can be assigned when ' indefinite' terms such as 'unjust' are included. He makes a distinction that ...
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Vide —

Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page : The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine

Weenie, Widdie, Wiki …

Ja³

Running a web crawler is a challenging task. There are tricky performance and reliability issues and even more importantly, there are social issues.
---Brin & Page

January 1992 - August 1994
Department of Defense, 9800 Savage Road, Ft. George G. Meade, MD 20755-6000
Co-operative education student
Completed four work tours (over a year total) with the National Security Agency. During my first tour I produced a sizable report on UNIX security which resulted in a $500 Special Performance Cash Award. On other tours I worked on natural language processing tools, telecommunications, and hardware design of an encryption chip.

By the way, Jon, can you break down the architecture stuff a little. I couldn't really follow it.

2.1.2. Intuitive Justification

PageRank can be thought of as a model of user behavior. We assume there is a "random surfer" who is given a web page at random and keeps clicking on links, never hitting "back" but eventually gets bored and starts on another random page. The probability that the random surfer visits a page is its PageRank. And, the d damping factor is the probability at each page the "random surfer" will get bored and request another random page. One important variation is to only add the damping factor d to a single page, or a group of pages. This allows for personalization and can make it nearly impossible to deliberately mislead the system in order to get a higher ranking. We have several other extensions to PageRank, again see [Page 98].

Another intuitive justification is that a page can have a high PageRank if there are many pages that point to it, or if there are some pages that point to it and have a high PageRank. Intuitively, pages that are well cited from many places around the web are worth looking at. Also, pages that have perhaps only one citation from something like the Yahoo! homepage are also generally worth looking at. If a page was not high quality, or was a broken link, it is quite likely that Yahoo's homepage would not link to it. PageRank handles both these cases and everything in between by recursively propagating weights through the link structure of the web.

Source. «What's in the Brin that Links May Character?»