A recent patent granted to Google discusses about the possibilities of Trust Buttons and persona pages to be added in each website in order to make way for user specific recommendations based on resources trusted by entities. The main idea behind this patent rests on the theory that recommendations given by our friends and relatives are more relevant and helpful to us as opposed to the ones given by any other third person whom we don’t know. The concept of Google Plus, people in circles and relationship of such entities all are part of this larger patent that might decide the future ranking signals which rates and ranks a webpage based on the trustrank specified by individual identities.
The Persona Page For Indicating Trust
As per this patent, every user on the world wide web has a persona page that says something about him/her. He/she can create any page on a website as a persona page by adding a tag to that page which identifies the associated system account. If a user does not have an external persona page, the system can provide an internal persona page. This page can contain links to other resources as well as entities which the person trusts. The trust rating is automatically generated by adding a system-specified attribute to these links.
The Trust Button
The persona page created by the person will have a trust button created by the system. Any user visiting the resource can activate the trust button to indicate the level of trust which he/she has on the resource. If the person already trusts the resource then the previous trust can be reset to a new value.
As the system can identify and create pages to trust even if the user does not have a persona page, this allows the system to incorporate trust smoothly into blog rolls, university research group pages and other places where the web contains networks of people that are reflected in links between pages. The trust value is easily detected and flows between such interconnected pages. The interesting fact is
that not only are the resources connected to each other but the entities are connected as well. This makes a complex but relevant system of interconnected entities each one of them defining their own trusted resource.
Another thing to note is that this trust can be topic specific. A person trusting someone on SEO might not trust him on topics related to travel. Every user has a specific system identifier which managers the trust relationship between the users and recommendations made by them.
This system is free from spam because it automatically reduces the trust value of recommended resources that are less visited by the people and similarly increases the trust value of those which are visited more frequently.
More information on this patent can be found here: Method and apparatus for obtaining recommendations from trusted sources
Recommended reading: MOVE OVER TRUSTRANK, MAKE ROOM FOR TRUST BUTTONS
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