The three factors that used to influence Facebook’s EdgeRank system — affinity, weight and decay — now comprise about .00003 percent of the total factors considered, according to a story published Friday on MarketingLand. EdgeRank was the system used to determine what shows up on users’ news feeds, but the company has replaced it with a machine-learning-based approach that takes into account about 100,000 factors.
The post goes on to list numerous new ways in which Facebook determines what to surface, including things like the type of post that it is and what type of device someone is using. Affinity, weight and decay are still important, it quotes Facebook News Feed Engineering Manager Lars Backstrom as saying, but there just a whole lot more facets and even a lot of subcategories for the original big three factors.
The MarketingLand report follows on the heels of a Facebook News Feed event earlier this month in which the company highlighted some the changes it has made to the feature.
As with the closely watched updates to Google’s PageRank system by SEO experts, the EdgeRank update is really more of a business story than it is a story about algorithms. Average users don’t particularly care where or whether stuff shows up, unless the experience starts getting annoying or starts losing value. In fact, in a world where user experience is king, it’s no surprise that companies like Google and Facebook use the latest data-analysis techniques and their ever-growing stockpiles of behavior data to predict what people will want to see.
It’s marketing types tasked with ensuring that consumers see their companies’ web pages and status updates that really care about this type of update. And, although they might openly discuss some of the changes, the companies probably aren’t too concerned about whether marketers can keep up. After all, if you want to get noticed, they have advertising products to sell.
To hear more about how Facebook uses data to improve every aspect of the site experience (and what tools it uses), check out our recent Structure Show podcast (it’s available on ITunes, too) where Barb Darrow and I interview Facebook Head of Analytics Ken Rudin.
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