So could all of this ultimately add up to a better search engine?
If things go well, we'll have a better search engine. This remains early, initial research, but our results look promising. Re-ranking results based on social histories does do a better job, and I do believe we will deliver interfaces that will find people who are debators, fine, but also those who are answer people... It turns out that people have a lot to give each other. There's a lot of knowledge to share, and 2 percent of every population is motivated to be a knowledge sharer.
Most of us have to rely on signs or symbols that suggest a person is reliable. With doctors you have their diplomas, the way the office looks, and most important, who referred you -- these are all indicators that we rely on. We are trying to create analogous tools for online environments where that data is latent, is not manifest in the interfaces visibly.
When you talk about a reputation system, I'm reminded of the eBay system.
We're similar but different -- eBay is an explicit feedback system, and we are an implicit feedback system. With eBay, buyers rate sellers, and sellers rate buyers, after they conduct a transaction. It's what people say about you. But there are real problems with this -- most of all inflation, the "Beverly Hills-adjacent" problem. If you read the L.A. real estate section, everything is "Beverly Hills-adjacent." So there is this tendency to inflate. There have been empirical studies of reputation ratings at eBay that suggest that just going by reputation ratings at eBay is not an indication that you're not going to get a fraudulent transaction.
Tell me about the Aura (Advanced User Resource Annotation) project.
Aura is about extending NetScan: "what if you could use NetScan with a pocket computer and attach threads to things?" We use the Toshiba e740 and a Compact Flash barcode reader, run Aura software, and can walk up to any barcoded object, any ISBN-coded object, scan it, and the device brings back information about that object…We imagine being able to walk up and down the aisle of a grocery store and have a handheld computer rate everything with a green light, a red light, a skull and crossbones.
