I have often thought about the potential for improving the relevancy of search engine rankings by taking into account some persoanl information about the searcher. If a search engine knows a few things about me and my interests, it may be able to use that information to provide me with more personally relevant search results.
In a reply to my recent entry on FOAF as part of a reputation system, and on his blog, Mark Thristan suggests that "networks of trust" could be used in a similar way to augment the relevancy of search results: "I was wondering whether, a bit like FOAF, a search engine could have a 'who do you trust?' section, where you log-in, and then identify other people on a database whose opinion you trust. Search results might gain extra weighting within the overall results based on their 'reputation' rating (where the results would be specific to your trust network)." Mark describes this with repect to a rating system, in which people rate the pages returned by the search query. This would be a highly effective way for reducing search engine spam, it would be very difficult to cheat, since only the ratings of the people you trust would count. In addition to ratings, the collective profiles of those within your network of trust could also be used to improve relevancy (perhaps within a certain number of degrees of separation, as chosen by the searcher).
Such a system also raises a number of other questions, to which there are no easy answers. What about the privacy issues around disclosing personal and group profile information to large powerful search companies? Would / should personal / group profiles be used in targeting advertising? Would such systems result in biased search results (our own bias, that is)? Because search results would (at least in part) be based on our current interests, would this cause us to become less open-minded to new ideas and new sources of information?
Posted by Mark at July 24, 2003 6:43 PM
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