[extropy-chat] Google Sets

[paul.bridger]

Mike Lorrey wrote:
> half a million hits a month is not an infinitesimally small number

True. However, how would google know how many hits per month your site gets? 
They don't (unless the conspiracy runs deeper than even you have imagined - 
something to worry about). OTOH, they would know how many referrals *they* 
give you, and I think this would be a good indication of your popularity.

>>2) Traffic is not what Google cares about. If you get 100k hits a
>>month from people involved with your organization, then you are still
>>a null value to Google's PageRank algorithm. 

Google *does* care about popularity. My guess is popularity is measured not 
just via PageRank, but probably also influenced by google referrals.

>>Occam's Razor suggests that this is a more
>>reasonable explanation that a conspiracy.
> incompetence before conspiracy?

I think conspiracy is a fairly interesting claim, and you'd need fairly 
interesting evidence to make it convincing.

> non-existent google sets
http://labs.google.com/sets?hl=en&q1=free+state+project&q2=libertarianism&q3=&q4=&q5=&btn=Large+Set
vs.
http://labs.google.com/sets?hl=en&q1=&q2=libertarianism&q3=&q4=&q5=&btn=Large+Set

Hey, at least including the FSP gets Neopaganism out of the set. What more 
could you want?

Interesting thing: you may have 7x the google entries of ExI, but people do 
not link to you 7x more.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=link%3Awww.extropy.org&btnG=Search
560 links
vs.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&q=link%3Awww.freestateproject.org&btnG=Search
980 links

I don't know how google sets works, but if I had google's database, I'd 
consider two pages to be related if they were both linked to by another page.

>>Finally, though Google plays its cards fairly close to the chest in
>>this regard, I'm pretty confident that a "Google editor" is a
>>non-existent thing. 
> Really? Then why do they have links for people to sign up to be google
> editors?

There are a couple of types of google editors I know about.
AdWords editors: http://www.google.com/jobs/adops.html
Answers editors: http://answers.google.com/answers/faq.html
I'd like to see a link for a search results editor (Democratic voting history 
a plus!).

I did a couple of google fights to settle the issue.
"evil google conspiracy" gets 67 000 hits, making it quite likely.
"incompetent google" only gets 43 400 hits.
However, "subtle algorithm" is the leading contender with 173 000 hits. 
That's my bet.

> If such engine content can be shaped by
> volunteer editors, as google allows

I really think you need to back this up.

Paul Bridger