I've noticed something recently: more websites are explicitly listing the URL of another page, rather than linking to the page itself.
In part, I believe they're doing this to avoid increasing the ranking of the mentioned website on search engines such as Google, which use linking structure to determine positioning in search results. Until recently, if you did a search for the word "Jew" on Google, an anti-semitic website came back as the top result. This is because a large number of other webpages mentioning the word "Jew" had links to that website. Many news articles that mentioned this fact (particularly those on anti-defamation websites) would only mention the offending website by URL (if at all) so as to avoid linking to it and ultimately contributing to the problem. On the flip side, there's a well-known phenomenon of "Google Bombs" whereby a group of people all place links to a given website on their webpages (or in their blogs) and also mention a certain word or phrase. Google's Pagerank algorithm ends up highly associating that website with those words, and you end up with cute results like President Bush's webpage coming up first when you search for "miserable failure." I was wondering if anyone had examined Google's Pagerank algorithm (or the ranking algorithms of any other search engine) as if it were an election method. Some of the problems search engines are currently facing (for which I'd bet they'd be willing to fund substantial research) are similar to strategy issues and fairness criteria satisfaction issues that come up in discussion here all the time. Roughly put, Google treats the web as if it were a set of elections (one for each word or phrase) with each webpage casting approval votes for any other webpage at all. It also combines elements of Candidate Proxy (or Steve Eppley's Candidate Withdrawal method, or the method Mike Ossipoff described in November 2000.) The magnitude of webpage X's vote is determined in part by how many other webpages are casting votes for webpage X (and also on how many webpages are casting votes for *those* webpages, etc.) It's a very interesting algorithm, in that it elegantly handles voting loops (A votes for B, who votes for C, who votes for A) and even includes a random "noise floor" element to increase performance of the system. (A search for "Google Pagerank" will point you to as many detailed descriptions as you like.) -Bill Clark -- Protest the 2-Party Duopoly: http://votenader.org/ ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
