[EM] Search Engines & Election Methods?

[Forest Simmons]

You might be interested in a paper entitled "Rank Aggregation Revisited,"
on this topic.  A google search for it will easily turn up pdf copies, for
example at

http:\\faculty.cs.tamu.edu/klappi/311/dwork.pdf

This is the article that introduced me to the "local kemenization"
that I have alluded to once in a while.

Forest



On Tue, 4 May 2004, wclark at xoom.org wrote:

>
> I've noticed something recently: more websites are explicitly listing the
> URL of another page, rather than linking to the page itself.
>
> In part, I believe they're doing this to avoid increasing the ranking of
> the mentioned website on search engines such as Google, which use linking
> structure to determine positioning in search results.
>
> Until recently, if you did a search for the word "Jew" on Google, an
> anti-semitic website came back as the top result.  This is because a large
> number of other webpages mentioning the word "Jew" had links to that
> website.  Many news articles that mentioned this fact (particularly those
> on anti-defamation websites) would only mention the offending website by
> URL (if at all) so as to avoid linking to it and ultimately contributing
> to the problem.
>
> On the flip side, there's a well-known phenomenon of "Google Bombs"
> whereby a group of people all place links to a given website on their
> webpages (or in their blogs) and also mention a certain word or phrase.
> Google's Pagerank algorithm ends up highly associating that website with
> those words, and you end up with cute results like President Bush's
> webpage coming up first when you search for "miserable failure."
>
> I was wondering if anyone had examined Google's Pagerank algorithm (or the
> ranking algorithms of any other search engine) as if it were an election
> method.  Some of the problems search engines are currently facing (for
> which I'd bet they'd be willing to fund substantial research) are similar
> to strategy issues and fairness criteria satisfaction issues that come up
> in discussion here all the time.
>
> Roughly put, Google treats the web as if it were a set of elections (one
> for each word or phrase) with each webpage casting approval votes for any
> other webpage at all.
>
> It also combines elements of Candidate Proxy (or Steve Eppley's Candidate
> Withdrawal method, or the method Mike Ossipoff described in November
> 2000.)  The magnitude of webpage X's vote is determined in part by how
> many other webpages are casting votes for webpage X (and also on how many
> webpages are casting votes for *those* webpages, etc.)
>
> It's a very interesting algorithm, in that it elegantly handles voting
> loops (A votes for B, who votes for C, who votes for A) and even includes
> a random "noise floor" element to increase performance of the system.  (A
> search for "Google Pagerank" will point you to as many detailed
> descriptions as you like.)
>
> -Bill Clark
>
>
>
> --
> Protest the 2-Party Duopoly:
> http://votenader.org/
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