Movies & Review Sites: Link-based Ranking
I’ve been watching more movies than usual this semester, and many of them have cultural backgrounds that I’m not familiar with or underlying themes and messages that require some analysis. That’s why I like to search up reviews and analyses online after watching them. Last week while googling reviews on the film The Grandmaster, I realized that over time, I’ve come to mainly visit the sites IMDB and rogerebert.com. I also realized that I rely on these two sites and trust them to be well-written and thoughtful for reasons that are related to our conversation in class about hubs and authorities and link-based ranking.
A way to look at the relationship between movie review sites and movies is by considering the sites as hubs, and the movies as authorities. A site that reviews (or in other words, links to) many movies consistently is more likely to be comprehensive and reliable, and a movie that is reviewed/linked to by many sites is more likely to be good, culturally relevant, or popular. This kind of mutual relationship and its refinement is modeled by the Principle of Repeated Improvement, where the value of each site or movie as a hub or authority is reweighted. Using the Hub and Authority Update Rules, the sites’ scores are updated according to how well-rated or popular the movies they review are, and the movies’ scores are updated according to how comprehensive or trustworthy the sites reviewing them are. This logic explains why it makes sense to utilize this kind of link-based ranking in how and what order search results are generated.
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-grandmaster-2013