[governance] 'search neutrality' to go with net neutrality

[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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