New PageRank Patent

[peter_d]

Bill has an explanation of a new PageRank patent:

http://www.seobythesea.com/?p=613

(1) the local PageRanks of pages for each host are computed independently using the link structure of that host,

(2) these local PageRanks are then weighted by the “importance” of the corresponding host, and

(3) the standard PageRank algorithm is then run using as its starting vector the weighted concatenation of the local PageRanks.

[Bill Slawski]

The nice thing about this is that it can speed up the way that pagerank is calculated a lot, considering that there are more links between pages within a domain than there are links between pages of different domains.

The fun thing about it is that if a pagerank calculation can become fast enough, personalized pageranks can be calculated for individuals.

[peter_d]

personalized pageranks

Their personal reputation level?

Related to this, perhaps - http://technology.guardian.co.uk/new...078061,00.html

[Bill Slawski]

I don't think so, Peter.

That one focuses more upon understanding interests through registration information or game play that might be mined to serve advertisements.

Though it seems to make some silly assumptions, based upon some simplistic views of gamers.

One that they mention in the patent application is that someone playing a male character in a role playing game should be served ads targeted to males. Yet the popularity of characters like "Lara Croft" show that sometimes people like to play characters that aren't much like them. See: Gender-bending proves popular in online games:

For a variety of reasons, Williams isn’t the only guy with a preference for female characters, according to Kathryn Wright, a psychologist in Raleigh, N.C., who consults for the Web site http://womengamers.com.

In an informal survey she conducted with 64 males , more than half said choosing a female character gave them a distinct game-play advantage. While a quarter said they played female characters because it added to the role-playing experience, Wright said others had a simpler explanation: visual stimulation.

“They’d rather look at a character that looks like Lara Croft than a character that looks like Rambo,” she said.

I've heard somewhere that Men Enjoy Pictures of Women

As for the personalized PageRank, I think the references to that are meant to be more similar to the ideas expressed about personalized PageRank from the first PageRank patent, written back in 1998:

This speed allows the ranking to be customized or personalized for specific users. For example, a user's home page and/or bookmarks can be given a large initial importance, and/or a high probability of a random jump returning to it. This high rating essentially indicates to the system that the person's homepage and/or bookmarks does indeed contain subjects of importance that should be highly ranked. This procedure essentially trains the system to recognize pages related to the person's interests.