[governance] 'search neutrality' to go with net neutrality (Corrected)

[Thomas Lowenhaupt]

Fearghas,

When you say:

> Personally my take on the original article is that the search rankings 
> were correct, they had no valid new / original content, just a  collection 
> of links.

Maybe so, but consider this from a search developer at one of the major 
engine companies:

> A real-world web search engine, such as Google's or Microsoft's, has 
> literally thousands or tens of thousands of ranking signals, updated or 
> introduced multiple times during a single day. Additionally, the 
> permutations are near infinite, as the major search engines are constantly 
> running concurrent experiments in an effort to dynamically tune the system 
> with real user queries and user happiness.
>
>  Moreover, modern search engines such as Google go so far as to customize 
> and personalize each result on the fly for each individual user, meaning 
> that there is no canonical ranking to begin with.  And all of this is 
> predicated on top of a very unpredictable and continuously changing corpus 
> of crawled data, with more and more of it arriving in near real-time.
>
>  Given all of that as context, I wouldn't even know where to begin to try 
> and make the ranking process visible to the user.  There is no one 
> algorithm, and no one corpus, no one frozen point in time, no way to even 
> explain the ranking process to lay-people to begin with.  A worthy 
> challenge, but I'm not sure how practically it could be done.

So creating transparent search is a challenging task indeed. Jimmy Wales' 
people gave a swipe at it a few years ago but got pounced on for its Alpha 
release. We've linked to that Wikia Search effort and others on our 
Transparent Search wiki page - http://bit.ly/TransparentSearch.

Best,

 Tom Lowenhaupt 


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