Popularity Metrics

In Tim Bray’s latest essay on search he points out what I feel is an often overlooked aspect of Google’s PageRank when it is applied to enterprise search:

“[PageRank] Won’t Work for You If you’re writing or deploying a search engine for your Intranet or product catalogue or portal, Google’s PageRank trick probably won’t work, because most Intranet and catalogue and portal pages don’t point at each other. The Web is unique in that it has millions of authors independently making decisions about what’s important; aggregating those decisions is what makes PageRank so powerful.”

“The Real Lesson of Google PageRank works on the basis of guessing that whatÂ’s popular is whatÂ’s important, which turns out to be a good guess. The technique relies on the WebÂ’s linkage network, and while non-Web deployments canÂ’t use that, we shouldnÂ’t give up on the notion of using a popularity metric.”(via Ongoing)

Indeed, and lowering the barriers to collaboration via corporate blogs and wikis will provide a rich corpus of popularity metrics.

In addition, I believe there is untapped potential in mining the ongoing dialogs found in email, IM and messages boards for relevancy references. I’m not saying however, that you use the dialogs themselves in search results; I’m simply suggesting that digital conversational data can be used to determine the popularity and thus importance of an object within a corporation.

Although I’m sure privacy advocates will fault with this notion.