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Saturday, March 06, 2004 |
OT: Tricksy, Thieving Bloggers!
With the search engine wars heating up now that Google has been reported to be near an IPO -- or not -- Wired News has an interesting story on something that could change the way search gets done. Researchers at what's left of Hewlett Packard (now just HP, thank you very much Carly Fiorina) have found something interesting: bloggers of high repute often steal links and topics from other bloggers. Now, that by itself isn't news, but what is fascinating is that the quality bloggers -- i.e., the guys providing the source material -- are often lesser known, and what's more, frequently don't receive credit:
These infectious people can be hard to find because they do not always receive attribution for being the first to point to an interesting idea or news item.The researchers said that this is all part of an idea they call "iRank", a ranking of information spread based on who actually originated the material. With everybody hot for the Next Big Search Algorithm, this is actually exciting stuff. So stop stealin' my baseball links! (Note to Jon, Terry, etc.: that was supposed to be a joke.)Indeed, the team at HP Labs found that when an idea infected at least 10 blogs, 70 percent of the blogs did not provide links back to another blog that had previously mentioned the idea.
To get past this obstacle, the researchers developed techniques to infer where information might have come from, based on the similarities in text, links and infection rates.
For instance, if Blog A used the words "furry germs" to link to an infectious topic like Giantmicrobes just days after Blog B in the same social circle used the exact same words and link, that would be a good sign that Blog A copied Blog B.
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