Friday, April 01, 2005

Improving Internet search: an idea

Kent and I were talking about Google results and the idea of customizing them. The result of our discussion ended up being sent to suggestions-at-google-dot-com. I think it's a really cool idea. It's such a big idea, though, that it would take a company like Google to pull it off. Do you think it would work? The suggestion:

I would like to be able to add weight to certain domains/sites such that they bubble higher up in my search results. For example, I like Wikipedia results. I would like to customize my search results such that pages from en.wikipedia.org get an extra "bonus" in their PageRank.

Building on that idea, it would be cool if I could add people that I know to a network of my friends. I could weight my friends so that their search preferences (preferred sites) also reflect in my search results. The further away a person is in the chain of people, the less their preferences effect my results.

This might be implemented as a star system on the results page. If I was satisfied, I can click back and score that result with 5 stars. If it did not answer my query, or if it was some search engine spam, I can give it 1 star.

The idea of bringing human feedback and social networks to Internet search could really make results better.

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