Find Similar Links on LinkRiver
I’ve been noodling on this feature for a while — how can I find “more links like this one” in LinkRiver. Putting on my machine learning hat, I contemplated link-to-link co-visitation schemes, semantic indexing, various clustering algorithms… but all approaches were too data-heavy, at least for now. There had to be an easier way…
LinkRiver has allowed full-text searching links (by river and stream) for a while now. The link title and host (i.e. www.techcrunch.com) are both a part of the index. Could the full-text search engine help out here? Let’s try it out.
One popular link today was a story on news.com about the possibility of eBay selling Skype to Google. What if I send the link host and title to the search engine? Are the results relevant?
Try it yourself: Click to see similar links
In most cases this works really well…
Twobile-Twitter for Windows Mobile
FriendFeed Has Search
But sometimes, the results are not so great:
TechMeme Leaderboard: Six Months In
Options - one thing I may do, depending on feedback, is stop including the link host as a part of the search query. Play around (click similar, then re-run the search after removing the link host from the search box) and let me know what you think.
Benjamin Golub said,
April 3, 2008 @ 9:55 am
Works well! The RSSmeme similar links is very different. It takes everyone who shared that link and finds out what else they have recently shared. The “recently” shared part is what has bugged me most about it, because it changes too quickly. I like your approach better.
adam said,
April 4, 2008 @ 6:32 am
Thanks Benjamin. For most queries its working pretty well. I still think an ideal solution would use co-visitation counts (Google News does that)… users who shared this were most likely to also share that, but that requires significant overhead.
saigalt said,
April 5, 2008 @ 8:16 pm
Ok …guess the feedback has to be this medium as I couldnt find anywhere on the site a way to do so …
1. ability to provde feedback via linkriver - either a blog or a forum
2. cannot change password . The change password option under settings does not allow me to do anything.
3. Existing or new items shared on my google reader do not flow through to linkriver …even though I set it up as my importings under settings.
4. If you mke an error as i appear to have made ( trying to get the book marklet going, it ended as a site in my river ) seems to be now way of “unsharing” or deleting .
Cheers