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By knowing precisely what the service returns given
knowledge of how it searches, what it searches, what
it excludes, how and by whom. Does it return
raw results or is it ranking? Is it locale-centric?
Does it enable adaptive visualization systems? Is
it directory based or indexing engine based? Does
it have an upper level ontology or is the ontology
configurable by the client?
Is the service free of political filtering or if
it does politically filter, how and with what checks,
are these biases public or private?
The Open Directory Project has guidelines for inclusion
and exclusion. That's an interesting case since it
makes the claim that most of the major search engines
use its product. That is a human editing system.
Is it ever affected by local conditions and how does
one know?
Good question, Rusty. If our perceptions of right,
wrong, applicable, inapplicable, popular, unpopular,
and all the other polarities are being shaped by
these search engines, we need to understand their
policies. If we are to build services over them,
think report generator, we need to understand them
even more deeply.
len
From: Elliotte Rusty Harold [mailto:elharo@metalab.unc.edu]
At 9:30 AM -0600 12/8/03, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
>Amplified acceptance of unverified assumptions
>is the very essence of robot wisdom. I am
>wondering about the viability of subscription
>search engines that contract for the quality
>of their results.
But how could you measure that quality to tell whether the contract was met?
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