News

"Websites Shed Light on How Humans Value Fresh Ideas"New Scientist (09/11/08); Barras, Colin
Emerging Web sites supplant more established Web sites half the time, a new study from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) researchers Vwani Roychowdhury and Joseph Kong and the University of Regina's Nima Sarshar suggests. The team visited roughly 22 million Web pages once a month for a year and recorded the number of other pages that link to each page, or its "in-degree." Just under half the pages with the most links were younger pages, and the proportion remained the same when the researchers raised the in-degree value above 1,000. Roychowdhury says the study suggests that the quality of content of a Web site ultimately determines whether it succeeds or fails. "Talent versus experience is difficult to document in a society," he says. "But what we show is that on the Web it can be documented in terms of page popularity--and newborn pages become more popular than older established pages on a regular basis." Search technology could benefit from the analysis, considering many engines use the page in-degree to deliver search results. Still, Roychowdhury acknowledges that ranking pages by the rate of in-degree growth might better reflect the impact of new Web sites.

For search engine, yes! Our research on the relation of shape and human personality also can give search engine a good criteria on picture or video search.