SIGIA-L Mail Archives: Re: SIGIA-L: Popularity in Relevance Ran
Re: SIGIA-L: Popularity in Relevance Ranking Was: understanding metadata
From: Victor Lombardi (victorlombardi_at_yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Sep 05 2001 - 14:51:39 EDT
At 10:43 AM 9/5/01 -0700, Laura Norvig wrote:
{snip}
>Now for the bad. A scary kind of dilution to common denominators. If I
>want a good burger, I'm not going to rely on choosing the most popular
>burger place in the whole country. We all know what restaurant that would
>be and how the burger would taste. Yuk. So, the popularity approach can
>sometimes give false legitimacy to mediocre information. This exact thing
>happens with citation frequency in the context of scholarly papers.
>Authors feel they *must* cite a popular article that has been cited by
>everyone else who wrote on the topic, even if the article is not
>necessarily all that great. If they *don't* cite it, people will think
>they haven't done their homework or haven't read this "seminal" article.
>This artificially jacks up the original article's popularity even further.
I used to rant about this drawback of Google quite a bit. I'm at peace with
it these days because I know how Google works and only use it when I want
popular search results. Unfortunately not everyone understands this
drawback. Below is an 'interface' of what goes on inside my head, and
(IMHO) is the kind of information that would help the typical user select
the appropriate search engine:
<http://www.noisebetweenstations.com/personal/weblogs/images/web-search-inte
rface.gif>
Victor Lombardi
http://www.noisebetweenstations.com/
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: Sun Nov 23 2003 - 22:54:48 EST
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