Technology Review: A Better Way to Rank Expertise Online. Websites where users can organize and share information are flourishing, but it can be hard to know which users and information to trust.
Now a team of European researchers has developed an algorithm that ranks the expertise of users and can spot those who are using a site only to spam. The technique works in a way similar to Amazon’s reputation engine or the ratings of Wikipedia pages, but it evaluates users based on a new set of criteria that makes intuitive assumptions about experts. The algorithm draws on a method applied in ranking Web pages, but takes it an interesting step further, says Jon Kleinberg, a professor of computer science at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, who was not involved with the work.
Social Relevancy Rank: What's Missing? The future of search almost certainly involves social networks, social graphs, or social filtering in some capacity.
Companies will live or die by whether they get the "social" part right: creating the right level of intimacy, trust, reliability, social connectedness, and accuracy in their results listings. Of course, this specifically means that their user experience must at least meet or, preferably, exceed that of Google's. To achieve this, we must first stop arguing over the different flavors of search.