It's interesting to see popularity used as an inverse corollary with quality. Imagine a TV that skipped the most popular programming (goodbye American Idol), or a radio station that only plays non-hits.
Of course, there are great websites out there that are very popular (Wikipedia, NYTimes/WSJ, StackOverflow). I'd love to see a search engine with a better signal for quality than non-popularity (this search engine), or SEO (Google), but it's a fun start. :)
He called it the "Yoyo" technique[1]. It doesn't work very well anymore, because Google's results are all quirky these days (you don't actually get what you literally search for, but what Google guesses what you intend to find).
[1] http://www.searchlores.org/yoyo1.htm (try to read past the preachy anti-commercialism, he could get kind of hot about that--whether you agree or not, there's troves of knowledge to be gained from that site)
Youtube, grooveshark and others kind of fill that gap. They still promote popular content though, but that's unavoidable unless you take money out of the equation.
i've had great success playing the non-hits format on college radio for years now, theres always great interest in what hasnt bubbled to the surface by force of popularity.
That's an awesome idea. You guys should add a button to Google search results that would completely invert the result list, and show the lowest stuff first, highest stuff last. Almost like sorting a list of products by price.
Anything you can identify as pure SEO spam, exclude of course. But if it's some original content that just isn't well connected or whatever, include it.
Then just observe user behavior for a while until you can discern patterns in how people who play around with that use it to discover new and interesting stuff. Maybe a new algorithm might come of it.
Reversing Google's results is an awful idea as you'd get the worst possible results for a search i.e. those that are completely unrelated to the search terms.
You need to either remove the top 100 (or 1000 etc) and look at what remains, or reverse only the top 10000 results (or 1000 etc).
I think that quality and page rank are not correlated. You may well have some quality sitting anywhere between page 1 and a million. Page rank is driven by various things like freshness and keyword matching. How do you determine quality?
This website is an interesting experiment however if you're after discovering random semi related pages, why not just use google or stumble upon?
Is there a way to include domains automatically excluded? For example WordPress.com is excluded.
You have to be careful with that idea since it can still lead to poor quality. My campus's radio station (WREK Atlanta) seems to play just weird music for the sake of being weird. They never play popular music, but they rarely play any good music either.
WREK is just about the best radio there is. It's not weird for the sake of being weird. It's intentionally eclectic and far-reaching, sure, but the point is to broaden horizons. As much for the DJs themselves to broaden their horizons as the audience.
I listen to WREK from Japan via iTunes Radio– in fact WREK, WUSC, and KCRW are the only reason I have to still listen to radio. I can understand not liking it though, I was pretty surprised the first time I was on campus and heard music I liked.
The University of Georgia's student station has a pretty strict music philosophy that excludes popular artists. I would disagree that it results in no good music being played.
"Artists who meet any of the following criteria are automatically disqualified from airplay on WUOG 90.5FM:
The artist is or has been in regular rotation on major commercial radio stations. This does not apply to material used in specialty shows on major commercial stations.
The artist has a music video that has aired on major music video stations. This does not apply to material used in specialty shows on major commercial networks.
Another criterion that DJs must use when selecting music for airplay is its position on the Billboard Album Charts. If one of the artist’s albums has entered the top 50, then a DJ cannot play that artist."
I think you're probably right, but do you mean that as a "dig" against millionshort? You may be entering meta-meta-contrarianism: the hipster of hipsters. :)
Of course, there are great websites out there that are very popular (Wikipedia, NYTimes/WSJ, StackOverflow). I'd love to see a search engine with a better signal for quality than non-popularity (this search engine), or SEO (Google), but it's a fun start. :)