[Sigia-l] The category of "Miscellaneous"

[Avi Rappoport]

At 6:07 AM -0400 6/16/04, Listera wrote:
>Eric Scheid:
>
>>  You're either missing the point or avoiding it: Google's algorithm relies on
>>  the billions of man-hours which have been invested into making relevant
>>  links.
>
>Google hasn't spent billions of man-hours to manually organize the web or
>make relevant links, neither those who created the raw content.

The labor was distributed across the Web and the time was spent by 
people making links, either as part of their job or as volunteer 
labor.

I have never seen a site or an intranet with anything remotely close 
to the quality of links of the public Web.  Even sites full of links, 
such as university and publication sites, point outwards as much as 
they point sideways to other documents on the same site.  Most of the 
links on sites and intranets are boring: they link to the home page, 
the FAQ, the HR department, parent pages... or in one memorable case, 
8,000 tech support case files.  They're navigational rather than 
informational.  This makes them much less useful for link analysis.

For the best research I've found so far research on the matter, see: 
"Searching the Workplace Web", Ronald Fagin, Ravi Kumar, et al. in 
"Proc. 2003 International World Web Conference  (WWW '03)"  
<http://www2003.org/cdrom/papers/refereed/p641/xhtml/p641-mccurley.html>

Avi
-- 
   Avi Rappoport, Search Engine Consultant <mailto:avirr at searchtools.com> 
   Complete Guide to Search Engines for Web Sites and Intranets
             <http://www.searchtools.com>