Comments on: Become Talks On AIR

By: Become A. Competitor

Become A. Competitor — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 10:25:51 +0000

> after all, calling your new algorithm AIR, but not publishing it might just open one up to some jokes - but they do have the right to protect trade secrets, after all.

Well, it ain't quite so, at least not all of it. Check out this page, courtesy of US PTO:

http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?d=PG01&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220030208482%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20030208482&RS=DN/20030208482

It has pretty detailed explanation of how the algorithm works. I've known this link for a long time, but I just didn't bother to read through it, as I didn't believe mathematics itself could lead to much user experience improvement. Maybe some curious people can study it and let us know how "superior" it is?

It's also kinda amusing to hear that these two guys were trying to hide something that's actually already public for a long time. Oh, did I hear somebody say ..."ostrich"?!

By: msobel

msobel — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 21:30:32 +0000

I tried it looking for a print server. I got 10m responses but no way to search by price. Either I don’t understand or …

By: ID:entity

ID:entity — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 19:31:54 +0000

Sounds very much like Authorities & Hubs (Jon Kleinberg '98, Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment) - but the editors are in the process of selecting perhaps either the Hubs or enabling the crawler to backrub from useful authorities.

So its a hybrid, where the context for the crawler is pre-determined, then the algo calculates the score in terms of relevance.

Well maybe, could be wrong!!

By: James MacAonghus

James MacAonghus — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 17:50:28 +0000

I compared Become to Froogle and I wasn't all that impressed. Yes, it does an OK job, but not much more than that, and it has been touted as revolutionary. Certainly it does not do sufficiently better than Google to take up mindspace on that difficult-to-manage "list of websites I simply must check when I buy something". See the write up at: http://aqute.typepad.com/aquteresearch/2005/02/becomecom.html .

By: Jon K

Jon K — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 17:50:09 +0000

Dave, great blog I enjoy reading your insights.

It sounds like quite a bit of calculating for each page (both intense human and computer review) how can it possibly scale with out extraordinary cost?

By: stan dushanbe

stan dushanbe — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 12:31:34 +0000

great post.

By: stan rusbug

stan rusbug — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 12:29:57 +0000

great post. thanks.

By: David Spencer

David Spencer — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 04:45:11 +0000

Re the simple phrase: "PageRank is published". This is true, but misleading, as it's just one factor in how Google scores pages - I think I read that there approx 200 factors in a pages score -other ones I've heard of are that title matches score higher, along with words in bold or h1 or h2 tags.

Great blog BTW.

thx,
Dave

By: Brian

Brian — Sun, 13 Mar 2005 22:26:54 +0000

Before they take a swipe at the biggest search engine on the 'net they should probably brief themselves on everything that's happened since that famous paper of 1998 (that's 7 years ago now Yang and Yun). Suggesting that Google's ranking is strictly linear and based soley on inbould links is ridiculous. How do you suppose they were able to extrapolate the exact same search algorithm to to the Google Mini, Froogle, Google Scholar, Google Local, Google News, Gmail, Google Desktop Search, Google Groups, Google Print, Google Catalogs and anything I missed.

Hint: They didn't.

By: Hashim

Hashim — Sun, 13 Mar 2005 20:39:59 +0000

"2) if it provides links to other valuable sites within a similar topic of interest (while minimizing links to off-topic sites)"

I had the same idea myself.