Two major topics were discussed under the “The World-Wide Web and Information Access” of this course: keyword-based advertising and modelling the effectiveness of network communication through the concept of hubs and authorities. The former discussed the sale of online advertisements, i.e. links on a Google search page, using the familiar second price auction system taught earlier in the semester. By modelling the willingness of buyers to purchase a prominent location for their online ad and using a second price auction system, market clearing prices can be determined as well as profits sellers earn. The latter demonstrated a model for analyzing the effectiveness of web connectivity by assigning hub and authority scores to webpages. One conclusion that came out of this discussion, as shown in homework 4, is that mutually reinforcing pages will score higher in the long run compared to pages that just have high in-degree.

What is neglected in this overview are the methods used to create levels of prominence and to enhance web connectivity. Creating levels of prominence on a search page is fairly simple: higher paid ads are displayed higher up in the list, with perhaps premier ads placed in a colored box at the top of the page. For other layouts the design may not be so straightforward. An example of a more complicated scheme can be seen with the website for The Cornell Daily Sun, www.cornellsun.com. Ads are not sold and displayed on this webpage, however as a for-profit organization, readership is essential to the organization and the effect of content layout on the website can be modelled in terms of the search engine example. Content can be laid out with varying degrees of prominence, and as a search engine would want to order its links to maximize profits, so this organization would want to lay out its content to maximize readership, and with it profits. One obvious method to achieve this effect would be to place the most popular or important stories of each department at the top of their section and pair it with a photo to clearly delineate that this story is the most eye-grabbing one for the day. This design would attract the greatest level of readership. More subtle methods would be to order the departments on the website by their level of importance, in this case: News, Sports, etc.

Enhancing web connectivity on the website also promotes readership. Mutual reinforcement of newspaper content on the web can be achieved by presenting content through multiple media. Recent developments at the Sun, namely podcasts, video clips and online news blogs, demonstrate this effect. They are used to achieve a greater level of readership by tying in viewers more closely towards articles. Podcasts (audio clips of stories and other varying content) are accessed on the website by the icon link that looks like a sun blaring out audio. Viewers tend to be more attracted towards visually appealing images than text and are easily inclined to access the link upon entering the homepage. Those who may dislike reading newspaper articles on a website may be allured by the idea of listening to an audio clip of the story, and of these some may decide to go back and read the article online. Regular subscribers to the website may also be interested in having articles read to them and so in addition to reading articles online would choose to listen to some of the podcasts. Thus, the versions of the same content mutually reinforce each other and enhance readership. Video clips and online news blogs provide an extra dimension to article content and reinforce them in a similar fashion.

To summarize, the design of webpages is essential towards maximizing profits, and the manner in which design plays a role can be analyzed through the models for ad auctioning and web connectivity.