Posts Tagged ‘google ’
So, in a seemingly inevitable, but nonetheless surprising move, Google has purchased Aardvark for $50 million. My last blog post was about Aardvark’s recent paper describing their social search engine, which included allusions to the research paper which was responsible for the creation of Google, so the announcement seems timely.
Earlier this week, the team at Aardvark unveiled a new paper “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine” which will be presented in April at WWW 2010. Inspired by and patterned after “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”, which describes the PageRank algorithm which drives Google’s search ranking system (which as Aardvark’s blog points out, was also presented at WWW 12 years ago). The paper, by Aardvark’s Damon Horowitz and Stanford’s Sep Kamvar, focuses mostly on the architecture of the Aardvark system, from the external representations with which users interact to the internal ranking algorithms on which the system runs. Below, I present a short summary of what they report, focusing on the elements I found most interesting.
This is a first post in a new format that I’m trying out: the “Meta-Review”. Besides the fact that it starts with an “M” (thus fitting with my category naming format), I’m calling it a “Meta-Review” because it’s composed of notes and thoughts about a handful of papers all mashed together. This isn’t intended to be a carefully thought-out treatise on the papers discussed, but instead is really just a more public version of my immediate thoughts and notes (if I’m going to write them down anyways, why not share?) Comments, discussion, and pointers to additional/related papers are encouraged, as they would benefit other readers (and more importantly, me).
In this post, I present a summary and discussion of 4 papers (and a poster abstract) about the role that domain expertise plays in web search behavior and performance.
