Information Research Weblog

Hi,

CollaborativeRank is a search engine that allows its users to make ranking suggestions and rewards them whenever those suggestions are subsequently liked by other users.

It is now available for testing/feedback:

http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~amichail/collabrank/

If you tell the system to rank a URL higher with respect to a query and subsequently others make the same suggestion, then you will be rewarded by taking your ranking suggestions more seriously.

This is done by computing "CollaborativeRank", which is a circular PageRank-like measure that assigns importance to both people making ranking suggestions and (query, url) pairs.

Usage is simple. Try a query and if you don't like the results, suggest a URL that should rank highly for that query.

For example, say you search for "wysiwyg editor", but don't like the ranking of search results. Moreover, suppose you know about TeXmacs, which is an excellent wysiwyg scientific text editor.

In that case, you could use "wysiwyg editor" as the main search query and "texmacs" as the secondary query. You will then be shown where TeXmacs comes up in the ranking for the "wysiwyg editor" query.

If you feel it is ranked too low, simply tell the system to rank it higher by clicking on the up arrow for the TeXmacs URL. (You will need to register to make ranking suggestions.)

Finally, note that you can easily browse your higher rank suggestions, which means that you can use the system to keep track of your favorite URLs, much like any bookmark manager -- but here, your list of favorite URLs can have an impact on everyone's search rankings.

Amir