MediaVidea

Socially aware Pagerank, anyone?

Can too much of crowd wisdom lead to bad search?

David Weinberger points to a study called Traffic Characteristics and Communication Patterns in the blogosphere by researchers at Boston University and Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil.

The study basically goes into how we discover blogs. The press release about the study says what many of us know: Page rank is not everything.

All well and fine, but then the study suggests (at least the press release does) that a new page rank algorithm is needed that takes into consideration the social attributes of the blog owner: celebrity status, reputation, and public image and so on.

1. How do we determine what determines social status?
Number of digged stories, bookmarks saved in del.icio.us, technorati favorites, all of which are subject to gaming.

2. Would page rank spiced up with social status give better results?

3. We already have something called Social Search, people sharing useful searches and links.

4. Doesn’t this lead to a ludicrous scenario where writers and analysts are hell bent on becoming famous for being unspectacular like Paris Hilton instead of their core areas?

Labels: pagerank

posted by Pramit Singh @ 4:59 PM