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Websites are the basic points of our interaction with the world of the internet yet rarely do they get the attention they generally should. From their elementary design three decades ago, to the current complex interfaces to meet user experience demands, the websites have come a long way.
From aesthetics to technicalities, websites have evolved over the past many years. It was this evolution that garnered the attention of WebAwards and that is how the company ventured into the journey of judging websites.
The domain WebAwards.com was registered back in 1998 and thus began its story of testing and trying, then surveying and grading sites on various parameters. But, it took the technology a notch higher after deploying an Artificial Intelligence (AI) body to judge websites.
The move won rave reviews from people and critics alike. However, prior to that, the team that built the AI faced a slew of challenges, including those regarding what constituted a better value system for judging a website.
The developers encircled on seven factors that they said could help calculate ‘mathematically’ the value of a website. These included Design, Content, Domain Name, Security, Speed, Technology and Traffic. These scoring parameters were then processed via certain variables and data to predict better outcomes and assign appropriate values to websites accordingly.
According to a report, the world had more than 1.93 Billion websites online in March 2022. These websites guzzled terabytes of bandwidth over the years but there is yet a benchmark platform to identify the best of these works and grade them. This inability has been attributed to one specific reason. Billions of these websites pose a fundamental challenge for a judge – no one can single-handedly judge all the websites in a single go owing to their large number.
Employing hundreds of judges could lead to disparity in terms of judgements for grading. Since beauty and aesthetics are subjective for each human, undertaking the services of hundreds of humans for this exercise could lead to diverse outcomes with no single parameter to properly judge websites. To counter the skewed narrative, Web Awards unveiled its very own AI-backed system to build a streamlined common grading system for each website.
The AI takes in the specific value pertaining to certain variables from a particular website. Breaking down aesthetics and colour combinations, the AI assigns a certain value to the creative aspect of websites. Easy to read content may also garner better votes while a favicon, a description tag or an SSL certificate may improve a website’s chances of scoring better grades on the system.
The AI platform also takes into account parameters such as usability, responsiveness and page load speed as variables to score websites better. A good rating on trustworthiness and vendor reliability could also increase a website’s chances of scoring a higher grade on the platform.
While the nascent stages saw multiple test runs for the AI, it used data scraped off of the internet and used it to improve its results. Additionally, WebAwards’ expertise in the domain for the last two decades came in handy during the development and testing phase of Paris of Troy. The digital awarding AI, went through multiple iterations to improve efficiency of the system and to derive specific output with regard to the given seven pillars. The AI eventually then learned to sieve the false data from the right one and then was deployed to take better inferences from the datasets.
The 2020 edition saw the platform processing a host of websites and a host of winners were declared across a slew of categories. The usual run of the mill winners included big-ticket players with optimum websites such as United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), outdoor brand Mammut, the money mint Monnaie de Paris, Sherlock Holmes Museum, among others. Other websites such as ones for the movie Dune and 3D modelling platform LotPixel also made the cut.
Named aptly after the Paris of Troy, the AI has broken ground on new technology in an arena that has traditionally been very human intervention-led. While automation had previously fast-tracked the manufacturing process, it looks set to do the same to the judging processes. The new network aims to build a new field of AI-led platforms streamlining operations for grading, however, it remains to be seen whether it can live up to the mark. All eyes are now on whether the company will be able to develop or not, an all-encompassing algorithm governing all aspects of judging criteria and entertaining all kinds of contingency situations.
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This content is brought to you by Andrea Mario.
Photo provided by the author with written permission from owner Colton Barter
