Stumbled across this the other day... It's the best search engine I've
seen yet. It uses a system which it calls "Hyperlink Vector Voting" to
rank the sites through which it crawls, using the anchored descriptions as
the criteria, rather than the site itself. I'd love to see AltaVista,
HotBot, or one of the other large crawlers implement something like this.
"The crucial innovation of Hyperlink Vector Voting is to collect anchor
descriptions as the content of a searchable database.=A0 Each description is
associated in the database with the referenced site, not the site where the
link appeared.=A0 In this way, the descriptions constitute "votes" as to the
subject of the referenced site.=A0 Counting these votes provides a
decentralized and democratic way to identify what each web site is about.=A0
The "vector" in Hyperlink Vector Voting refers to the mathematics used for
weighting the votes according to frequency. [...]
"We think the best way to evaluate the Hyperlink Search Engine is as
follows.=A0 Ask it about subjects for which you already know the strongest
web sites.=A0 For example, if your hobby is raising guinea pigs, and you kno=
w
the major guinea pig web sites, then search on guinea pigs, and see which
sites it returns among those you would rate as the top ones.=A0 Then submit
the same query to other search engines and let us know how the results
compare!"
-WHEN YOUR ONLY TOOL IS A HAMMER-
-EVERY PROBLEM STARTS TO LOOK LIKE A NAIL-