Warren Buffet has written a great deal on value investing, a technique to investing that he has used to consistently outperform the S&P 500 over the past 20 years.  A short summary of his work can be found here  .  Value investing is not a new concept, it was most famously written about by Ben […]

Most of us have a list of friends at that numbers in the hundreds or even thousands, but I’m sure that most of us only consider some proper subset of them friends. Whether the complement of that set is the remnant of people who randomly friended you before coming to Cornell or just people […]

Is the magic of Google’s ad network wearing off?
This blog post from BloggingStocks raises that exact question. Google built its empire on the idea of contextual, text-based ads that are relevant to the content that the reader is interested in. This simple system, described fully in chapter 11 of the test, allowed the search company to […]

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-scientology062590b,1,279442.story?coll=la-news-comment
For the past several years, the Church of Scientology has received a great deal of media attention. Tom Cruise publicly proclaiming his alliegance to the church and the increase in the membership of high-profile celebrities are some of the examples. According to the article on the L.A. Times, the Church of Scientology sees active recruitment […]

dab97
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2212947/microsoft-friends-social-networks
The above article discusses Microsoft’s plans to integrate their Windows Live system into leading online social network services. Windows Live is a set of online features that can be accessed through a browser that include instant messaging, search engines, and web security. Microsoft seeks to open up new ties to networks such as […]

Throughout this course, we have discussed the internet as an amazing tool for connecting people across the world, which “has made possible entirely new forms of social interaction, activities and organizing, thanks to its basic features such as widespread usability and access” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet). As the most frequently visited websites, sites such as Google, Yahoo, […]

http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20152/
On January 30th, 2008, two undersea cables connecting Europe with Egypt and  the Middle East with India were cut.  These cables were fiber-optic cables providing Internet access to and from the regions.  Immediately large portions of the Middle East and India were without Internet access because these cables were bottle necks for Internet activity.  The […]

In class we discussed how online search engines make high revenues through keyword based advertising. From the advertisers’ perspective, this form of advertising is an excellent way to ensure that their ads are viewed by users who have expressed a similar interest through their online query (word search). However, it is not always the case […]

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3fc8f6dc-1ff0-11db-9913-0000779e2340.html

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/03/21/digesting-googles-new-ppa-advertising-product/

The past several weeks we have discussed the internet and the implications of link analysis

and the ranking of sites. In today’s extremely volatile stock market, the search engine giant

Google stands at as one of the lone bright spots in an incredibly shaky economy. As discussed

in Chapter 10 of our text, internet advertising […]

A couple of years ago, I remember reading a blog that reported that BMW’s german site had been banned and its PageRank reset to 0.  Google was punishing the company for exploiting its search algorithm. It was found that BMW was using a “doorway page” for many of its sites to artifically increase its ranking. A doorway page is usually a single […]