

The power of links and the value of global knowledge - mattjung
http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2008/04/power-of-links-and-value-of-global.html

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ntoshev
I think Paul overrates the value of the global view on such data. Simple link
count works well for evaluation of the importance of the web page until the
Heisenberg effect kicks in (people start to adapt their pages to score better
in the algorithm). My hunch is that it is enough to know the local structure
of a densely-connected social graph.

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paul
Actually, link counts are pretty much worthless.

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ntoshev
Really? Can you say why?

I haven't tried it, but link counts look like a reasonable first approximation
of pagerank. I thought this is also the consensus among researchers, e.g.:
[http://anand.typepad.com/datawocky/2008/03/more-data-
usual.h...](http://anand.typepad.com/datawocky/2008/03/more-data-usual.html)
[http://research.microsoft.com/users/nickcr/pubs/craswell_tre...](http://research.microsoft.com/users/nickcr/pubs/craswell_trec02.pdf)

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paul
It's easy for a low quality page to have a bunch of links. The blog post you
linked is also wrong about AdWords -- the pricing model is important, but
there's a lot more to it than that (which is part of the reason why Yahoo
can't catch up).

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aswanson
I think another HN reader as well as myself mentioned this earlier: Amazon has
a _much_ richer dataset than Facebook, and the context of purchasing when you
visit the site. Their recommendation algorithms have cost me so much of my
money, I don't even want to think about it. The implied and clustered
behavioral data for advertising is all there, whether people are "friends" or
not. The only thing I see that they lack is a buzzphrase like "social graph".

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ntoshev
Perhaps "social graph" is a natural phrase only if you use the word "graph"
naturally. It certainly feels natural to me.

