The Polidoxa Shift: a New Approach to Social Networks

Manuel Mazzara¹, Antonio Marraffa², Luca Biselli², and Luca Chiarabini³

¹School of Computing Science,

Newcastle University,

Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, United Kingdom

manuel.mazzara@ncl.ac.uk

²Polidoxa.com

Germany

antonio.marraffa@polidoxa.com, luca.biselli@mac.com

³University of Parma

Italy

luca.chiarabini@unipr.it

Abstract

Access to global information is of primary importance in a global world. The Internet contains a

huge amount of documents and it has a big potential as a news media, but the key is in the mechanism

in which information is accessed. This paper describes a novel idea consisting in combining the

potential of both social networks and search engines. We describe here the basic ideas behind a trust

ranking algorithm based on the activities and networking performed by users on a social network.

We motivate the need for Polidoxa, the combined social network and search engine, and we finally

describe the advantages over traditional media, traditional search engine like Google and social network

such as Facebook.

Keywords: Social Networks, Ranking Algorithm, Trust