Thursday 6 September 2012

WWW initial idea of hyperlinks vanish as we rely more and more on google page rank

Page rank is an intuitive algorithm and the more we rely on it, the accuracy of page rank gets worse. What is the reason of that situation? Page rank relies on hyperlinks, but now it is just easier to Google anything than remember a hyperlink. So newer pages have fewer hyperlinks, which is very bad for page rank. A CERN worker - Tim Berners-Lee is an inventor of WWW whose initial idea was based on scientific documents having links to other documents. This was an inspiration for hyperlinks. Now, instead of giving an exact hyperlink we say 'google for these words and for sure you'll find what you're looking for'. We got rid of hyperlinks in favour of more intuitive Google search engine. We find it hard to remember facts, so we increasingly use Google, but there is a dangerous consequence. If our supposedly associative memories rely on building associations, which are strengthened when traversed during recall, the more we use Google the less we can remember! The conclusion is to use Google when it's absolutely needed and be more precise by including links to the information according to all Tim Berners-Lee commended. Probably, it's not viable and practical to follow these rules, so we have to improve the existing algorithm every which way. Probably, in the end we'll have to come up with another idea of indexing documents. Fortunately, not all hope is lost. Mere indexing is poor at capturing deeper associations between documents, words and concepts. However, as we search and retrieve we also divulge on the relative relevance of search results. Google is exploiting such relevance feedback and, for example, analyse how many seconds we stay on a page. If only for a few seconds, it means that the page wasn't relevant for us, but if we opened a link and didn't repeat the search, it means that this was a relevant result. Ok, but what about us? Exercising recall abilities is not the only time connections are built. We create fresh connections when reasoning which on the other hand is based on lots of facts. Google provides these abundantly and easily, encouraging more reasoning, so building more, probably deeper associations!

No comments:

Post a Comment