anallawalla - 10:32 pm on Sep 29, 2008 (gmt 0)

Has anyone ever defined such a list of [seed] documents? I can only wish. Many people assume that DMOZ is one, and .gov domains are another. The quote from the patent mentions Amazon, so that would be a third, and I'd guess that most of the .int domains are a fourth area for trust seeds. I'm sure the list is a lot bigger than the few I just ticked off.

That's why I mentioned the Google Directory rather than DMOZ.org to suggest that Google's own domain has got to have some trust. Yet each of us could name a few dodgy sites that should never have been in DMOZ, hence the inheritation of trust is an equally interesting onion to peel. I contrast it to the corporate parent to subsidiary case where trust appears to flow more readily within the corporate web farm.

While there would be some hand-selected seed documents, it would take a month of Sundays to compile seed documents covering all possible topics for all trusted domains.

I believe that there has be a second level of algo-selected shortlisted sites that need a quick human confirmation, but are considered to be seed quality until the human review. For example, .edus used to have blanket trust but now all folders (for example) beginning with a tilde might be assigned less trust. This is why I suspect that trust needs to be at a folder or page level and not for a domain.