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Siri (and other mobile interfaces) will eventually need semantic opinion data
Search engines, which process text and give you a menu of potential matches, make sense when you use an interface with a keyboard, a mouse, and a relatively large screen. Consider the below search for...
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How Ranker leverages Google’s Knowledge Graph
Google recently held their I/O conference and one of the talks was given by Freebase’s Shawn Simister, who was once Freebase’s biggest fan, and has since gone on to work at Google, which acquired...
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Validating Ranker’s Aggregated Data vs. a Gallup Poll of Best Colleges
We were talking to someone in the market research field about the credibility of Ranker’s aggregated rankings, and they were intruiged and suggested that we validate our data by comparing the...
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How Crowdsourcing can uncover Niche/Trending shows
At Ranker, people give us their opinions in various different ways. Some people vote. Other people make long lists. Still others make really short lists. Some people tell us their absolute favorite...
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Mitt Romney Should Have Advertised on the X-Files
With the election recently behind us, many political analysts are conducting analyses of the campaigns, examining what worked and what didn’t. One specific area where the Obama team is getting praise...
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The Opinion Graph predicts more than the Interest Graph
At Ranker, we keep track of talk about the “interest graph” as we have our own parallel graph of relationships between objects in our system, that we call an “opinion graph”. I was recently sent this...
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Crowdsourcing Objective Answers to Subjective Questions – Nerd Nite Los Angeles
A lot of the questions on Ranker are subjective, but that doesn’t mean that we cannot use data to bring some objectivity to this analysis. In the same way that Yelp crowdsources answers to subjective...
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Predicting Box Office Success a Year in Advance from Ranker Data
A number of data scientists have attempted to predict movie box office success from various datasets. For example, researchers at HP labs were able to use tweets around the release date plus the...
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Ranker Uses Big Data to Rank the World’s 25 Best Film Schools
NYU, USC, UCLA, Yale, Julliard, Columbia, and Harvard top the Rankings. Does USC or NYU have a better film school? “Big data” can provide an answer to this question by linking data about movies and...
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An Opinion Graph of the World’s Beers
One of the strengths of Ranker‘s data is that we collect such a wide variety of opinions from users that we can put opinions about a wide variety of subjects into a graph format. Graphs are useful as...
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Rankings are the Future of Mobile Search
Did you know that Ranker is one of the top 100 web destinations for mobile per Quantcast, ahead of household names like The Onion and People magazine? We are ranked #520 in the non-mobile world. Why...
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Examining Regional Voting Differences with Ranker’s Polling Widget
Ranker has a new program where we offer a polling widget to partner sites who want the engagement of a poll in list format (as opposed to the standard radio button poll). Currently, sites that use our...
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Hierarchical Clustering of a Ranker list of Beers
This is a guest post by Markus Pudenz. Ranker is currently exploring ways to visualize the millions of votes collected on various topics each month. I’ve recently begun using hierarchical cluster...
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Why Topsy/Twitter Data may never predict what matters to the rest of us
Recently Apple paid a reported $200 million for Topsy and some speculate that the reason for this purchase is to improve recommendations for products consumed using Apple devices, leveraging the data...
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How Netflix’s AltGenre Movie Grammar Illustrates the Future of Search...
I recently got sent this Atlantic article on how Netflix reverse engineered Hollywood by a few contacts, and it happens to mirror my long term vision for how Ranker’s data fits into the future of...
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Ranker’s Rankings API Now in Beta
Increasingly, people are looking for specific answers to questions as opposed to webpages that happen to match the text they type into a search engine. For example, if you search for the capital of...
View ArticleLists are the Best way to get Opinion Graph Data: Comparing Ranker to State &...
I was recently forwarded an article about Squerb, which shares an opinion we have long agreed with. Specifically… ““Most sites rely on simple heuristics like thumbs-up, ‘like’ or 1-5 stars,” stated...
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Can Colbert bring young Breaking Bad Fans to The Late Show?
I have to admit that I thought it was a joke at first when I heard the news that Stephen Colbert is leaving The Colbert Report and is going to host the Late Show, currently hosted by David Letterman....
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Gender and the Moral Psychology of Game of Thrones
Most of my published academic work is in the field of moral psychology, where we study the moral reasoning behind judgments of right and wrong. As I have previously argued, such study does not belong...
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Comparing World Cup Prediction Algorithms – Ranker vs. FiveThirtyEight
Like most Americans, I pay attention to soccer/football once every four years. But I think about prediction almost daily and so this year’s World Cup will be especially interesting to me as I have a...
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