Spitballing here, but what if instead of a monolithic page rank algorithm, you could combine individually maintained, open set rankings?
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I mean to say you as the user would gain control over the ranking sources, the company operating this search service would perform the aggregation and effectively operate marketplace of ranking providers.
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For example, one could be an index of "canonical" sites for a given search term, such that it would return an extremely high ranking for the result "news.ycombinator.com" if someone searches the term "hacker news". Layer on a "fraud" ranking built off lists of sites and pages known for fraud, a basic old-school page rank (simply order by link credit), and some other filters. You could compose the global ranking dynamically based off weighted averages of the different ranked sets, and drill down to see what individual ones recommended.
Seems hard to crunch in real time, but not sure. It'd certainly be nicer to have different orgs competing to maintain focused lists, rather than a gargantuan behemoth that doesn't have to respond to anyone.
Maybe you could even channel ad or subscription revenue from the aggregator to the ranking agencies based off which results the user appeared to think were the best.
Well I suppose Google has some way of customizing search for different people. The big issue for me is that google tracks me to do this. Maybe there could be a way to deliver customized search where we securely held the details of our customization. Or we were pooled with similar users. I suppose if a ranking algorithm had all the possible parameters as variables, we could deliver our profile request on demand at the time of search. That would be nice. You could search as a Linux geek or as a music nut or see the results different political groups get.
Building something like this becomes much easier with Xanadu-style bidirectional links. Of course, building those is hard, but eliminating the gatekeeper-censors may finally be the incentive required to get bidi links built.
It's also worth noting that such a system will have to have some metrics for trust by multiple communities (e.g. Joe may think say, mercola.com is a good and reliable source of health info, while Jane thinks he's stuck in the past - People should be able to choose whether they value Joe's or Jane's opinion more, affecting the weights they'll see). In addition (and this is hard, too), those metrics should not be substantially game-able by those seeking to either promote or demote sites for their own ends. This requires a very distributed trust network.
===Edit=== I mean to say you as the user would gain control over the ranking sources, the company operating this search service would perform the aggregation and effectively operate marketplace of ranking providers. ===end edit===
For example, one could be an index of "canonical" sites for a given search term, such that it would return an extremely high ranking for the result "news.ycombinator.com" if someone searches the term "hacker news". Layer on a "fraud" ranking built off lists of sites and pages known for fraud, a basic old-school page rank (simply order by link credit), and some other filters. You could compose the global ranking dynamically based off weighted averages of the different ranked sets, and drill down to see what individual ones recommended.
Seems hard to crunch in real time, but not sure. It'd certainly be nicer to have different orgs competing to maintain focused lists, rather than a gargantuan behemoth that doesn't have to respond to anyone.
Maybe you could even channel ad or subscription revenue from the aggregator to the ranking agencies based off which results the user appeared to think were the best.