I spent most of the day in the Workshop of Web Dynamics.
Yen-Yu Chen et al presented local methods for estimating page rank, that is efficiently estimating the page rank values for some pages if only a small subgraph is locally available. They included estimates of errors in the estimate, and I think this could be quite useful to play around with alternatives to the page rank algorithm and to quickly tune parameters and check their effect. Unfortunately, the error estimation wasn't formalized, so that it will be hard to predict how changes in the algorithm affect the quality of estimates.
Simon Courtenage and Steven Williams presented an idea to suggest alternatives webpages while browsing. It's a little bit like the related pages feature first found in the Alexa toolbar, but uses the last followed hyperlink for the query instead of just the destination page.
Olfa Nasraoui presented new methods to make recommendations based on log mining. Of interest, compared to other related methods, is the property that longer sessions increase performance instead of decrease - although long sessions are usually much more dissimilar to each other due to the higher number of variables. I will have to read the details in the paper and wonder how much one can adapt these things to query-heavy websites; she worked on sites with a relatively low numbers of different URLs.
After Lunch, I switched to the Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem. The presentation of BlogPulse by Natalie Glance showed the surprising amount of filtering and processing they do for their key phrases and related analysis. Surely a site to look follow in the future.
Back in the Web Dynamics Workshop, Ricardo Baeza-Yates updated us on the recent development in the Chiliean Web. The discussion surfaced various theories on the dynamic and motivation of individual websites.
Alexander Markowetz presented his ideas for Geographical Information Retrieval, which is of course of much interest to me, since we have been doing this since 1998. We will have to see if we can cooperate with him on his project, which should have a geographical search engine for germany in fall.
Then, I concluded the day by taking a great salsa lesson with Frankie Martinez...
Posted by seefeld at May 19, 2004 20:48