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Let's spend a few more minutes on our
hidden agenda of the link between search

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and the mind before we return to
technology and algorithms.

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So page rank as we've seen is quite
intuitive and we rely on it more and more.

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How does this behaviour of ours affect the
accuracy of page rank?

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Does page rank get better because we use
it more and more to search?

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Does it get worse?
Or are these two things completely

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unrelated?
Let's think about it in this way.

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Page rank relies on hyperlinks between web
pages.

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Well, why should we include hyperlinks in
our web pages when it's easier to just

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Google anything?
Increasingly, more and more people are

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putting fewer and fewer hyperlinks in the
new material that they put up.

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This is bad for page ranks.
Since we have fewer hyperlinks in the web,

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the accuracy of page rank gets worse and
worse.

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The more we use page rank, the less we put
in hyperlinks and the more inaccurate page

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rank will get.
Now let's ask the reverse question.

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We find it hard to remember facts, so we
increasingly use Google.

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How does this affect our ability to
remember things?

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It's generally believed that our memories
rely on building associations between

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words, incidents, facts.
Each of these being strengthened every

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time we duress them during acts of recall.
In this case, the more we use Google to

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remember things, the less we can remember,
because we don't traverse our associations

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as much as we did before.
This is actually the argument made by

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Nicholas Carr in his 2010 book, The
Shallows, what the internet is doing to

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our brains.
But, is there a positive side to the story

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as well?
Let's talk about Google first.

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Mere indexing based on words and their
occurrence in documents is quite poor at

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capturing deeper associations between
documents, words and concepts.

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However, when we search and retrieve
documents, we also divulge information on

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the relative relevance of the search
results in comparison to our query.

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So for example, if we click on document
which page rank returns to us, we are

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revealing that we are actually interested
in that particular result as opposed to

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others.
Exploiting such relevance feedback.

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From users.
Can actually improve search.

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And be used to augment, page rank itself.
So our use of search itself can be used to

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improve search.
Even while page rank's original avatar

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might get less and less relevant as we use
fewer and fewer hyper-links.

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But what about us and our memories.
Well, exercising recall abilities is not

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the only time connections are built
between synapses in our brain.

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We use and create fresh connections when
reasoning about things as well.

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But reasoning relies on a lot of facts.
And Google provides these facts abundantly

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and easily.
Encouraging more reasoning, and so

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building more and probably deeper
associations.

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Just think how much easier research has
become when we can recall facts from

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Google, rather than relying on our own
memories.

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Well we shall soon return to technology
and search.

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But hopefully this diversion into our
hidden agenda will spark some interesting

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discussions on the forum.
I'm looking forward to it.