Ramblings & ephemera

Google PageRank explained

From Danny Sullivan’s “What Is Google PageRank? A Guide For Searchers & Webmasters” (Search Engine Land: 26 April 2007):
Let’s start with what Google says. In a nutshell, it considers links to be like votes. In addition, it considers that some votes are more important than others. PageRank is Google’s system of counting link votes and [...]

Search for “high score” told them who stole the PC

From Robert Alberti’s “more on Supposedly Destroyed Hard Drive Purchased In Chicago” (Interesting People mailing list: 3 June 2006):
It would be interesting to analyze that drive to see if anyone else was using it during the period between when it went to Best Buy, and when it turned up at the garage sale. We [...]

Killer search terms

From The Inquirer’s “Killer phrase will fill your PC with spam”:
THERE IS ONE phrase which, if you type into any search engine will expose your PC to shed-loads of spam, according to a new report.
Researchers Ben Edelman and Hannah Rosenbaum reckon that typing the phrase “Free Screensavers” into any search engine is the equivalent of [...]

Thoughts on tagging/folksonomy

From Ulises Ali Mejias’ “A del.icio.us study: Bookmark, Classify and Share: A mini-ethnography of social practices in a distributed classification community“:
This principle of distribution is at work in socio-technical systems that allow users to collaboratively organize a shared set of resources by assigning classifiers, or tags, to each item. The practice is coming to be [...]

Tracking terrorists with Unintended Information Revelation

From “New search engine to help thwart terrorists“:
With news that the London bombers were British citizens, radicalised on the streets of England and with squeaky-clean police records, comes the realisation that new mechanisms for hunting terrorists before they strike must be developed.
Researchers at the University of Buffalo, US, believe they have discovered a technique that [...]