I started writing this as a personal mail to Tim Baker, then as it became bigger and bigger I realised how it would probably be of interest to the whole community, so I send it to the discussion list and in copy to Tim.
*************** I just came back from the vacations and I find the two new jewels of delicious: the search engine and the reccomendation system. Really cool. I have some questions though. What is the alghorithm behind them. In particular I tested the search engine, and found that if I looked for two quite different tags 'religion' and 'folksonomy' I would get quite some results, but none that contained both the keywords. Not just not in the search page (which I gather gets the most heavy -high weight- tags), but also in the individual page. Infact I would often get one of the result, look at all the person that has bookmarked that entry, look for one of the two keywords, and either one or the other would be absent. Is this how is it suppose to behave or is it a bug? The reason why I chose religion and folksonomy is because I know there is a page that has been tagged with both those tags, but such that no one person used both the tags, and I wanted to make sure the search engine was searching on the whole tag cloud (as implied by Brian in the discussion group entry of some time ago). It might even be that you are using the search on the hipercube and it is nearer a result that has a high value for folksonomy and nil for religion, than one that has a non nil value for both but not a high value on either. If this is the case we should think about it, maybe adding the symbol '+' before a keyword to clarify that the keyword MUST be present might be a good idea. Now speaking about the reccomendation system. It is REALLY GOOD. I have already found some very good pages. In fact I just went to an article I was very interested to, looked for related and got a bunch of articles, EACH important and EACH new. WOW. Now some questions. 1. Again what algorithm does it uses? Joshua sais, is the same algorithm as before but I could not remember any post describing it in the last months. 2. Could the results be offered in the same way as the search results are given: Name of URL, number of people using it, most relevan tags. In this way it would be very easy to navigate delicious going from one link to the relevant, to the next relevant and so on. Some group of URL will make small islands, and some will make bigger islands, but users will have the possibility to explore the whole island. 3. if the reccomandation system uses a distance between urls, are we sure that getting the first n is the most wise way to proceede? Seem to me that it should give ALL the results below a certain threashold. And if the number of results is less than x, than (and only then) the best n anyway. Said all this I really like the reccomandation system, and it seem to me that it has the potentiality to bring delicious to a whole other level. Regards, Pietro Speroni http://www.pietrosperoni.it ____________________________________________________ Start your day with Yahoo! - make it your home page http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@del.icio.us http://lists.del.icio.us/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss
