First, for those who may not be familiar with Apostolos Gerasoulis and the Teoma search technology, ExpertRank (which now powers Ask.com), here’s a brief synopsis:
- The web is made up of communities of experts on given topics (science, math, literature, underwater basket weaving, etc.)
- The links within a subject-specific community can be identified and given higher weight than links from off-topic websites or pages.
- Using subject-specific communities of experts as the basis for link weighting will produce better results than a global link metric that doesn’t differentiate based on topic.
For a long time, I’ve felt that the Teoma technology was a strong alternative to Google, Yahoo!, & MSN’s ideas of global link measurement (though those engines may very well also use some degree of community measurement). Lately, however, I’ve been thinking that the entire hypothesis behind Teoma – that topical communities know better – might be false.
The topical community system would have a tough time with many of the emerging (and some of the classic) patterns of recognition and discovery on the web, including:
- Dogmatic Communities – in which sites around a topic may be insular and incestual, prohibiting new content or new ideas from making a significant appearance.
- The Blogosphere – where subject-specific communities are greatly outnumbered by random-topic sites, and even sites inside a subject area often point to resources outside their expertise.
- Populist Intelligence– the idea that the popular vote, rather than the votes of the few in power, will produce better results.
- Multi-Topic Sites – Wikipedia, Digg, Reddit, Newsvine, Squidoo, and hundreds of other emerging properties don’t have a topic expertise per se.
- Temporal Trends – Many of the “expert” sites that the Teoma algorithm was built around followed the classic model of static, resource hubs. Today, a great number of sites evolve and update content and links on a daily basis, pointing to the latest and greatest. The resource sites, meanwhile, are often stale and conservative, failing to pick up on trends or new information.
What’s your opinion? Is the Teoma concept still viable? Was it built for an earlier model of the web and is now obsolete, or can it evolve and embrace social networking, user-generated content portals, the blogosphere, and less well-defined web communities?
