Reports. Retweeting. EdgeRank: The Secret Sauce That Makes Facebook’s News Feed Tick. Yesterday at its f8 developer conference, Facebook engineers Ruchi Sanghvi and Ari Steinberg gave what may be the first thorough walkthrough of the underpinnings of Facebook News Feed, the all-important page that users see when they first log on to the site.
After giving an overview of the history of News Feed, which has evolved quite a bit since it launched in 2006, they offered some insight into the algorithms that allow News Feed to show you relevant content, collectively called EdgeRank. You may not realize it, but News Feed only displays a subset of the stories generated by your friends — if it displayed everything, there’s a good chance you’d be overwhelmed.
Technology Review: How Google Ranks Tweets. To deliver useful search returns from the so-called real-time Web–such as seconds-old Twitter “tweets” reporting traffic jams–Google has adapted its page-ranking technology and developed new algorithmic tricks and filters to keep returns relevant, according to a leading Google engineer.
Google rolled out real-time search technology last month, to offer searchers access to brand-new blog posts and news items far faster than the five to 15 minutes it previously took Google’s Web crawlers to discover newly created items. Bing, Cuil, and other search engines also provide various kinds of real-time results. What is your influence on twitter?