AllFacebook.com has posted the attached image of Facebook’s “Suggests a friend to me” feature. Not sure what make a friend suggestable to another Facebook user, but if this algorithm can eventually be applied to the giant global graph, the web will truly become become a social graph.
Wikia is working to develop and popularize a freely licensed (open source) search engine. What you see here is our first alpha release.
We are aware that the quality of the search results is low.
Wikia’s search engine concept is that of trusted user feedback from a community of users acting together in an open, transparent, public way. Of course, before we start, we have no user feedback data. So the results are pretty bad. But we expect them to improve rapidly in coming weeks, so please bookmark the site and return often.
Right now, the most important thing you can do is help with the “mini articles” that appear at the top of popular search terms. These will vary in purpose according to the circumstance, but the primary uses will be:
At the bottom of every page is a link to Post bug reports. Please use that link liberally to give us large amounts of feedback.
Search is a fundamental part of the infrastructure of the Internet, and therefore it can and should be done in an open, objective, accountable way. This site, which we have been working on for a long time now, represents the first draft of the future of search.
Please feel free to join us, make some friends, and let’s try to do something friendly, interesting, and different.
This is a demo of the Google Search Engine. Note, it is research in progress so expect some downtimes and malfunctions. You can find the older Backrub web page here. Google is being developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin with very talented implementation help by Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg.
Google Operating System Weblog, “Google Is All About Large Amounts of Data“: In a very interesting interview from October, Google’s VP Marissa Mayer confessed that having access to large amounts of data is in many instances more important than creating great algorithms.
Right now Google is really good with keywords, and that’s a limitation we think the search engine should be able to overcome with time. People should be able to ask questions, and we should understand their meaning, or they should be able to talk about things at a conceptual level. We see a lot of concept-based questions — not about what words will appear on the page but more like “what is this about?” A lot of people will turn to things like the semantic Web as a possible answer to that. But what we’re seeing actually is that with a lot of data, you ultimately see things that seem intelligent even though they’re done through brute force.
When you type in “GM” into Google, we know it’s “General Motors.” If you type in “GM foods” we answer with “genetically modified foods.” Because we’re processing so much data, we have a lot of context around things like acronyms. Suddenly, the search engine seems smart like it achieved that semantic understanding, but it hasn’t really. It has to do with brute force. That said, I think the best algorithm for search is a mix of both brute-force computation and sheer comprehensiveness and also the qualitative human component.
Marissa Mayer admitted that the main reason why Google launched the free 411 service is to get a lot of data necessary for training speech recognition algorithms. (more…)