If spammers have access to the source code, they will be able to develop their attacks more quickly; as a result, we'll see those attacks in the wild more quickly, and more people will have the potential to develop responses to those attacks.
Making the algorithms open doesn't mean that any flaws will be fixed quickly; it just means that they'll be _found_ (more) quickly. Part of the problem here is that it's a lot harder to make a good fix to an algorithm than it is to correct an historical article. For one thing, as I mentioned on BB, random Wikia users won't have access to the data that informs the algorithm design; all they'll be able to see is the algorithm and the resultant rankings. Nor, I suspect, will Wikia be letting just anyone _edit_ their algorithms, unless they're complete idiots.
there are loads of academic papers on search engines whose results just never get integrated into any real system because the closed-source developers are too busy and most academics don't really care about seeing their work actually implemented
From my experience, part of the problem with translating academic results to search engines in particular is that it's hard for an academic to demonstrate that their approach or improvement will work in actual practice. They don't have the data and they don't have the massive scale, and they don't know about all the rest of the inputs to (and demands on) the system. So the response of the search engine devs is likely to be something like "yeah, that might be cool, but...". Which is presumably one reason why Google wants to hire all those PhDs, so that they can work on these things in situ.
(Speaking of which, I'm going to be in Mountain View next week (for orientation at Google, actually). I gather that you're in some completely other time zone these days, but if you'll be in the area I'd like to get together and chat. My contact information is on my website, which is reachable from my LJ userinfo; let me know if you're interested and available.)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 07:56 pm (UTC)Making the algorithms open doesn't mean that any flaws will be fixed quickly; it just means that they'll be _found_ (more) quickly. Part of the problem here is that it's a lot harder to make a good fix to an algorithm than it is to correct an historical article. For one thing, as I mentioned on BB, random Wikia users won't have access to the data that informs the algorithm design; all they'll be able to see is the algorithm and the resultant rankings. Nor, I suspect, will Wikia be letting just anyone _edit_ their algorithms, unless they're complete idiots.
there are loads of academic papers on search engines whose results just never get integrated into any real system because the closed-source developers are too busy and most academics don't really care about seeing their work actually implemented
From my experience, part of the problem with translating academic results to search engines in particular is that it's hard for an academic to demonstrate that their approach or improvement will work in actual practice. They don't have the data and they don't have the massive scale, and they don't know about all the rest of the inputs to (and demands on) the system. So the response of the search engine devs is likely to be something like "yeah, that might be cool, but...". Which is presumably one reason why Google wants to hire all those PhDs, so that they can work on these things in situ.
(Speaking of which, I'm going to be in Mountain View next week (for orientation at Google, actually). I gather that you're in some completely other time zone these days, but if you'll be in the area I'd like to get together and chat. My contact information is on my website, which is reachable from my LJ userinfo; let me know if you're interested and available.)