iSMOblog

You think this one is a social bookmarking site…well, not really! This one does involve bookmarks, sharing and all the other things related to any other bookmarking site, but there’s more. There is mathematics, research, formulae, semantics, analysis, correlation etc. No, you are not reading about any science lab or any of its experiments but of a social bookmarking site that has a scientific base and methodology!

What exactly it does

When you first go and check out GiveALink.org, its going to be hard for you to understand what it is all about and what it really does. Let me make this easier for you. GiveAlink works in order to search for different alternatives to the central search algorithms i.e. it works to find out new and innovative methods breaking all the rules of conventional searching (by search engines). There are complicated procedures involved in this task, including formulae, correlation, collaborative filtering and so on. No wonder, this is all too complicated in itself.

How it does what is does

The sub head is itself a bit confusing. And thus is in perfect sync with our topic of discussion. Now jokes apart and on a serious note. GiveALink asks its users to donate their bookmarks to them. GiveALink system then analyzes these bookmarks using a scientific collaborative filtering technique and the hierarchical structure of the bookmark files and folders. This technique is used to give them an estimate of the semantic similarity of those bookmarked URLs. The basic assumption on which this site’s theory works is that they believe that individuals who have shared the same tastes in the past will continue to have the same tastes even in the future.

‘The’ difference

The difference between GiveALink and other search engines is that while other search engines gives you the results by using text analysis tool i.e. they analyze the keyword(s) entered by you and on the basis of that give you the result. On the other hand, GiveALink proposes similarity measures for URLs using both hierarchical structure of bookmark files and folders and also collaborative filtering across all users. Thus, after calculating similarity between, GiveALink makes guesses about the topic and displays results of what it thinks might interest you. This is done by assuming that what others, who are like you, like, you might even like the same thing. And this is obviously done by analyzing the bookmarks that its users donate to them.

The more novel thing about GiveALink is that its results are not only texts or HTML format stuff, but also that it might even include movie feeds, JavaScript, and may be only images or URLs containing images.

This site does something we commonly know as a ‘Case Study’. It studies you on the basis of bookmarks submitted by you and then relates them to other users and their bookmarks. And the rest follows. All I can say is that if you are bored of using Google, Yahoo or MSN, then a shift to this might be interesting and refreshing.