Google Sidewiki is a new feature being added today to the Google Toolbar that allows anyone to leave comments about pages as they surf the web. Love something you’re reading? Hate it? You can share your views with others who visit the page and who also have Sidewiki enabled. Share, that is, if Google thinks your comment is good enough.
The post continues with a detailed explanation and screen caps.
Danny continues:
What comments are shown, and in what order? Google secret sauce time. The official line is this:
Using multiple signals based on the quality of the entry, what we know about the author, and user-contributed signals such as voting and flagging, we work hard to ensure that only the highest quality, most relevant entries appear in the sidebar. Most of the engineering work for Sidewiki was dedicated to this ranking algorithm.
When I talking with Google about Sidewiki, they gave me a few other factors, such as:
+ Use of sophisticated language: “This page sucks” isn’t sophisticated; think complex sentences and ideas. Apparently, Google has a language sophistication detector now, and one that works in the 14 different languages that Sidewiki supports.
+ User’s reputation: Are your comments being voted up or flagged down?
+ User’s history: How long have you had a Google Profile? How long have you been commenting?
Danny says that you can also share comments with people who do or do not use the toolbar.
From the Conclusion:
Sidewiki feels like another swing at something Google seems to desperately desires — a community of experts offering high quality comments. Google says that’s something that its cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted more than a system for ranking web pages. They really wanted a system to annotate pages across the web.
Certainly Google’s goal is to be something more than another commenting system.
“I think we would have failed if people were using it to say ‘Obama sucks’,” said Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management at Google.
That’s not to say the system is meant to promote pro-Obama comments! Rather, the hope is to produce more intelligent and thoughtful comments regardless of a particular position about Obama or any other topic.
“If those are the comments we’re surfacing, [Sidewiki] wouldn’t be that much different than much of the web. What we’re really trying to do is add value from people who really know what they’re talking about,” he said.
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