A few years ago (2015), curious about where meaningful conversation might be hiding out online, I did a little experiment, making use of Google Web Search as it happens.

The process involved finding a set of search terms which might be expected to appear in more substantive discussions, or at least, the sort of discussion I'd tend to be interested in, and then see how many such occurrences there were across various sites, domains, TLDs, and the like.

The result was "Tracking the Conversation: FP Global 100 Thinkers on the Web".

The title comes from the list of terms I'd used, the Foreign Policy Global 100 Thinkers list, contributed by readers of that magazine (and I suspect curated by editors). That is, it's generated by a third party, reflects a largely refined audience, reflects a range of political and ideological viewpoints, and are mostly reasonably distinctive.

I approximated total page hits on a site (in English at least) with a search for the word "this".

And to proxy for more mundane comment, I chose to search for the arbitrarily selected string "Kim Kardashian".

This of course gave rise to the now-world-famouse FP:KK ratio. That is, the ratio of hits for the FP 100 Global Thinkers vs. "Kim Kardashian" on a given web property.

Another metric was FP/1000, which is mentions of the FP 100 names per 1,000 web pages (based on the "this" search results).

I chose roughly 100 websites and/or domains to search. This meant performing 30,000 cumulative web searches, a practice Google apparently take a dim view of, though performing one query roughly every 45 seconds or so seemed to work at the time. (Google's anti-bot defences have since become far more rigorous.)

The results were interesting and occasionally surprising.

Facebook had by far the most detected pages, 2.6 million at the time. Again, this isn't a precise count but a relative proxy.

Wordpress had the 2nd most FP100 results, and a density 10x greater than Facebook. This was when I realised that Wordpress in fact ran the sites behind a great many other organisations and publications, many of which are fairly high quality.

Metafilter had by far the highest FP:KK ratio at 32.75. (Compare Facebook at 2.10, and Twitter at 0.96.)

Google+, supposedly where smart people tended to hang out, rated only an FP:KK of 0.39.

I also looked at a number of mainstream and alternative media sites (the New York Times scored abnormally high, but that was largely through having one of the FP100 members as a columnist, mentioned not only on his own articles but in many others, Paul Krugman). Fox News scored predictably low (and many instances referenced the then Pope), but still higher than the BBC and Reuters.

Alternative media tended to rate higher than mainstream, but often focusing on a relatively small number of liberal thinkers, Noam Chomsky standing out in particular, also Krugman and Lawrence Lessig.

In education, what struck me was how much more content results appeared for leading private universities (Harvard, MIT, Stanford) than flagship public schools, with UC Berkeley especially paltry page count, though a higher FP/1000 ratio. University of Michigan represents better. I included a few European universities as well, which had modest results.

I don't recall why I threw Federal Reserve domains into the search, but this was when I realised that St. Louis is effectively the research arm of the system.

And I threw in generic and cc TLDs for good measure.

As mentioned, the reseach as conducted would be virtually impossible today, though there are now several quantitative searchable archives which report on the number of results across hosts and/or domains for various terms. I'd really like to be able to make use of those.

In the context of the past few years, refining searches to terms of more recent interest and relevance to information quality would also be fascinating.

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...