Posts tagged Algorithms
5 Sorting Algorithms Facebook Should Consider Instead of Highlighted Stories
Jan 17th
No matter how many times I tell Facebook I want it to display the most recent updates from my friends first, it keeps reverting to highlighted stories. You can (attempt to) influence Facebook’s sorting by manually tagging stories, but if Facebook really wants to separate the wheat from the chaff I can think of a few ways to do it.
Some say there are only seven basic literary plots in all the stories in the world. Likewise, you can boil down most Facebook updates into a handful of types – and I think many users would love to be able to filter out at least five of those types.
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Sports – Some of my friends are sports fans. I’m not. During any major sporting event, my social media feeds are flooded with play by play commentary, inane chanting ("Go $team!" for whatever value of $team) and other sports commentary. I know, some folks actually like sports. A way to filter out the sports noise would be a boon to the rest of us, though.
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Entertainment "news" and award show commentary – The flip side of sports chatter is the commentary on awards shows and entertainment news. Some people may care what kind of outfits are being worn on the red carpet, or what the Kardashians are up to this week, but many more don’t. Give us a filter, please.
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Politics – I’ll admit, I’m guilty of a lot of politics updates on Facebook. Some of my friends are up for the political discussions, though, and others aren’t. It’d be nifty if Facebook would let users who are less interested in politics just avoid the topic entirely. A minor twist on this: It’d be great if Facebook would have pity on the rest of the world and provided a filter to omit discussion of U.S. politics, especially presidential campaigns. We’re sorry world, really.
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Monday/Friday posts – This should be relatively easy. Provide a filter for the "ugh, it’s Monday!" and "thank God it’s (almost) Friday!" posts.
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Repost Requests – You might like sports, politics and award shows, but here’s a post type I bet most of ReadWriteWeb’s community could do without, the repost request. Also known as the "chain status," some of Facebook’s users have carried forward the unwelcome tradition of chain emails and letters. You know, the "won’t you please repost this to show you care?" stuff.
Now, maybe you’re a sports, entertainment and political junkie that is having a terrible Monday and wants everyone to repost a chain status. What kind of updates would you dismiss if you had a way to sort them out completely?
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How Google Tweaked Its Search Algorithms In December
Jan 6th
Google’s monthly search improvement digest is a whopper this month, describing 30 highlighted changes to the way Google search works. This month, Google has started adding code names to make the changes easier to remember and follow.
The tweaks are a little bit scattered, affecting all different aspects of Google’s search returns. Most of them affect the actual presentation of results. A couple affect the way results are ranked. There are two new kinds of results for entertainment-related searches. And there are a few back-end improvements and adjustments affecting site administrators.
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These are just the changes we think are the most interesting. For the full, rather daunting list, check out Google’s Inside Search blog.
Changes To Page Ranking
The page ranking changes all affected image searches. One change, codename “simple,” improves the analysis of image landing pages. “We want to make sure that not only are we showing you the most relevant images, but we are also linking to the highest quality source pages,” Google’s blog post says. A related change, codename “leaf,” extends existing algorithms from main search results to improve spam detection in Image Search.
These two changes are related to changes noted in last month’s report. In November, Google reported that it was retiring a signal that looked for images referred to by multiple documents around the Web. It also improved detection of “official” pages for topics or brands.
Changes Affecting Presentation of Results
Continuing a trend, this month’s changes affected the sitelinks that display below a search result, as well as the rich snippets that fill in results with ratings, reviews, images or other content. The “concepts” adjustment focuses the sitelinks algorithm to show more relevant links, such as those specific to the user’s metropolitan region.
The process for detecting sites that qualify for shopping, recipe and review rich snippets has been improved, so more results will start showing rich snippets.
Relatedly, there are two new types of search results. The “Live Results” project will now display NFL and college football scores and standings live. Another change improves the display of Google Places results for concert venues, showing up to three upcoming events for major venues.
Two more aesthetic changes affect the +1 button, which now only appears when you hover your mouse or when the result has already been +1′d, and to image sizes in Image Search. Codename “matter” will now display images with larger full-size version.
Changes Affecting Infrastructure & Performance
Codename “old possum” changes the final destination URL in mobile search results, skipping more of those annoying mobile redirects for faster smartphone browsing.
Encrypted Google search is now available on regional domains, but it’s opt-in. Users in the U.K., Germany and France can go straight to the secure version of their regional Google domain, e.g. https://www.google.co.de, to activate secure search.
SafeSearch has also been improved. Codename “Hoengg” improves the result filtering under strict SafeSearch. The methods for finding related queries have been improved, making the algorithm more conservative and using a new dataset to determine relationships between search terms.
For the webmasters, Google has added so-called “soft 404″ detection for sites that don’t send the right HTTP code when a page is missing. Google doesn’t know how to crawl pages that are missing but don’t send the correct 404 code, so this change improves the way Google detects “soft 404″ pages.
There are more changes this month, but they’re mostly little, behind-the-scenes things. If you’re interested, the full list is available on the Inside Search blog.
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Google’s New Traveler Recommendations Point Towards an Age of Algorithms
Aug 2nd
Google’s Places today expanded its offerings to include restaurant and place recommendations in cities neither you nor anyone you know has recommended before. Recommendations to date have been because “you rated a place like this highly.” They now include places “rated highly by people like you.”
That might sound simple, but it’s important and, if the recommendations prove good, there’s probably some complicated math going on behind the scenes to determine what you’re like. Google leadership has said for months that its future lies not in serving up results in response to your search queries, but in telling you what you want to do before you even ask. There’s something about this news that brings that promise to mind for me.
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The new recommendations will be served up in Google Maps search results, both on the desktop and in Google’s mobile apps.
Recommendation-as-a-service service Hunch began experimenting with efforts to point its “taste graph” technology at local venues last Spring (If You Like Men With Mustaches, You’ll Love These Restaurants) but the battle for effective recommendation technologies around real-world activity is likely just beginning.
The Age of the Algorithm
Some people argue, in fact, that this kind of taste detection and recommendation technology is part of a larger trend that will become a key part of the technology industry of the near-term future.
Dr. András Faragó, Computer Science Professor at the University of Dallas, said in an interview last week that we’re entering the Age of the Algorithm.
“While no one questions the value of software today, the underlying intellectual content, the algorithms, are still viewed by many as something without hard value. The value is still typically assigned to the implementation, not the algorithm. In a sense, algorithms up until very recently have had the same relationship to software implementation as software previously had to hardware: icing on the cake.
“On the other hand, there are more and more situations, as signified by the Heritage Provider Network’s $3 million prize (for early detection of people at high risk of later hospitalization), where the really hard part is finding the right algorithm. Once it is found, the implementation can be done by any skilled team, and I believe this may show the emergence of a trend in which in which the industry starts recognizing the real, hard value of sophisticated algorithms.”
In many cases, that hard-fought battle will end up looking to end users like low-key, smart recommendations of new restaurants in new cities.
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Head to Head Comparison of Text Extraction Algorithms
Jun 10th
A few months ago we linked to Tomaž Kovačič’s overview of text extraction algorithms. Now Kovačič has posted an evaluation of several text extraction algorithms and services, including Boilerpipe, NCleaner, the Python and Node.js versions of Readability and the Extractiv API.
To conduct his evaluations, Kovačič used the cleaneval dataset, which includes 681 documents, and a Google News dataset with 621 documents harvested by the authors of Boilerplate.
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Metric for the Google News data set
A few notes:
- NCleaner did better on its own Cleaneval data set than it did on the Google News data set, but Boilerpipe did well on both sets.
- Kovačič’ was surprised by Readability’s poor performance, and notes the discrepancy between the two ports. He thinks the original JavaScript version may do better.
- The commercial APIs had the most consistent results.
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Hacker Poll: Do We Need An App Store for Algorithms?
Jun 1st
Rapid-I announced this week that it will offer a marketplace for RapidMiner extensions to its open source data mining tool RapidMiner. “Over the years, many of you have been developing new RapidMiner Extensions dedicated to a broad set of topics,” the company’s announcement stays. “Whereas these extensions are easy to install in RapidMiner – just download and place them in the plugins folder – the hard part is to find them in the vastness that is the Internet.” You can visit the beta version of the extension marketplace here.
It doesn’t appear that there’s a mechanism for offering paid extensions, yet. But Decision Stats blogger Ajay Ohri hopes to see this turn into an app store for algorithms.
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“For some time now, I had been hoping for a place where new package or algorithm developers get at least a fraction of the money that iPad or iPhone application developers get,” Ohri writes. “It is hard work to think of new algols, and some of them can really be useful.”
Ohri hopes that there will be a way for data miners to at least donate money to algorithm inventors through the RapidMiner interface.
Since Microsoft and other companies are already offering marketplaces for data, an algorithm marketplace makes sense as the next logical step. What do you think? Is it time for an app store for algorithms?
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Automatic Algorithms Are Fundamentally Changing The Shape of SEO – Search Engine Land
Apr 19th
 Search Engine Land |
Automatic Algorithms Are Fundamentally Changing The Shape of SEO
Search Engine Land Many SEOs and SEO agencies aspire to run SEO automatically, using technology. Not surprisingly, it turns out that search engines are thinking along similar lines. Ilya Segalovich, the CTO of Yandex, mentioned during my visit to Yandex in Moscow, … |
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Automatic Algorithms Are Fundamentally Changing The Shape of SEO
Apr 19th
If search engines — such as Yandex in Russia — are generating their search query algorithms automatically using “machine learning,” does that mean we need a re-think of SEO practices? What is “machine learning” in this context and how does it work? Yandex may be a “regional” search engine, but…
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