The only Lensrank change we've made recently is to slowly decrease the weight of Angel blessings over a period of weeks. This is to make sure that it doesn't become impossible to get into our Top 100 lists without massive amounts of Angel blessings.

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"...we're actually in the process of removing trackbacks from our lensrank algorithm. 99.999% of the trackbacks we receive are spam, and we just don't have the resources to manage it..."

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The idea that lensrank is broken is highly subjective. If my lens is not in the top spot, of course it seems unfair. Keep in mind that while I may not agree with the subject matter of some of the lenses with very high lensrank, they are doing all the right things (right meaning successful and legal according to our TOS) in order to promote themselves. We can tweak lensrank to prevent gaming of one specific factor, but if a lens is visited, rated, favorited, emailed, and is generating revenue all at once, it will naturally achieve a higher lensrank no matter what. Short of punishing individual lenses simply because we don't like them (which we won't do), and removing lenses which violate our TOS (which we already do), our hands are tied. That is why we'll soon be introducing the People's Picks --to introduce entirely human picked lists.

The reason why lensrank has so many factors is because it is very difficult to determine whether one lens is "better" than another. Sure, there are some lenses in the top 100 that I'd rather not see there, but would you agree that a lens in the 1-100 range is generally much better than a lens in the 1000k-5000k range? That is our primary goal. If we spent every waking moment making lensrank perfect (which I don't even believe is possible, because of what I explained above), we wouldn't have time to work on anything else.

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An Algorithm Suggestion...

I originally was just going to list the lenses by the number of stars. But then someone, I think it was Rick Phillips, pointed out that the number of ratings can be more meaningful.

I toyed around with a few idea, and the current combination is simple, in my view, gives a fair amount of weight to both the number of stars and the number of ratings.

I had considered just adding those two numbers or just multiplying, but those seemed to me to give too much weight to the number of ratings.

A couple of ideas on possible ways to improve on what I did (I don't know how feasible these ideas are, but they would be easier for you than for me):

Possibly more weight might be given to --
*Raters who have a longer history on Squidoo
*Raters who are more active on Squidoo, in one or more ways
*Ratings that deviate more from the usual ratings that that specific person gives
*Raters who have lenses on the same or a similar topic (This could go both ways. They would be more knowledgeable, but they would also have some incentive to knock down the competition)

Possibly less weight might be given to --
*Ratings that deviate far from what is typical for a given lens (For instance, if a given lens has had some healthy number of ratings of at least four stars, and then one or two people give it one or two stars.)

While we're at it, I'm wondering about the possibility of allowing non-Squidooers to rate lenses. If some lenses get unfair ratings from their competitors, that might be balanced out by allowing non-Squidooers to rate lenses.

Maybe you could even have two sets. Just a thought.

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Maureen's Top Lenses by Star Rating Lens

Just a headsup that we're doing another (small!) tweak to the LensRank algorithm tonight, so if lenses shift around a little in the morning that's why. As ever, we're constantly trying to come up with combos that reward a) good handbuilt content that is b) promoted well and c) recommended by readers.

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LensRank is very volatile, in a good way. The system calculates LensRank data from a rolling 2-week window, meaning that "one hit wonder" lenses that are popular for a few days won't necessarily maintain that status when the dataset refreshes.

The SquidTeam is constantly tweaking the LensRank algorithm in small ways, in response to how our traffic and your lenses behave. We reserve the right to update the algorithm from time to time to make sure the system isn't being gamed, and we'll give you a heads-up here before we do anything big.

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