Forum Moderators: phranque
I'll be strick and short. I am disappointed with the present situation the www works what concerns the search engines and the way they rank pages according to the number of incoming links to the page in general.
The problem as I see it, is that only webmasters can create these links. An average internet user, which has no any blog or is not inetersted in participating in any forums, is not able to do ANY JUDGEMENT on the page content quality. And that is exactly the problem. Most of www browsers are an ordinary users, he is ussualy not a webmaster, not an admin.
So why an ordinary users have to trust the content that the webmasters link to? I think thats unfair and does not provide the best quality.
To my opinion, the best quality judgers would be the users, of course. I have no idea how that would be implemented in practice, but the point here is that the MAJORITY OF USERS HAVE LIKE THE CONTENT and have a possibility to RATE IT.
I suppose you guys here speak a lot about OTHER ways of getting traffic to the website in other ways that from SE. What kinf of searching methods do you think will pop-up in the future.
Or do you think the Page Rank which is built on linking where webmasters link is an ultimate solution?
Chears,
Al.
On one level, that's exacty what pagerank does. If a website has more incoming links than another, then it must be more popular. It's about the relative, not absolute, number of incoming links, just like in an election.
However, just like in an election (where not everyone votes), not every web user can create a link ('cast a vote'). Instead, a sub-section of the population (i.e. registered voters) is extrapolated to include everyone. In the same way, webmasters 'votes' (incoming links) are extrapolated to include everyone who uses the web.
It's not perfect, but it would be almost impossible (at the moment) to get everyone's vote in an impartial way. When someone develops such a method, I'm certainly buying shares in their company.
One possible way would be to use something like a toolbar to record the amount of time that someone spends viewing a webpage. Logically, the longer they spend viewing the page, the more useful it will be. This obviously would need to be balanced out by taking into account the content of the page somehow. For example, a page might just consist of a flash game that people spend hours playing. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's useful content. Although it would be, if someone was searching for a flash game.
Thinking more about it, toolbar based user monitoring will probably define the future of determining the worth of a page. Once again, the big G has a head-start, as I'm sure their toolbar is installed on a large proportion of browsers throughout the world.
I'd better be off to buy more shares in G...
Sounds like a very simple idea? Has anyone tried to implement that inpractise?
Al.
