Posted by Jim at March 30th, 2004

Here’s what I’m thinking about as a master’s project:

The goal of the project is to allow people to find what they want more quickly than in your average search engine. This would be done by creating a distributed program that keeps track of what links the user preferred with regards to a particular topic. When another person using the same program types the same keywords, they will recieve other people’s top choices for these keywords. Theoretically, the top choice will be most useful of all.

Useful measurements for a link’s usefulness might be whether the user bookmarks it, the number of people who investigate that link, and/or possibly a voluntary user rating system.

Technologies used might include: Java, jxta (a Java based peer-to-peer system), Google’s public API’s.

Challenges would likely include:
1. Designing the page ranking algorithm
2. Sharing the information
3. Working with Google’s API’s
4. Designing an interface that captures the information without interfering with a user’s browsing.