When Google was founded in 1998, the standard for Internet service was still dialup – barely sufficient to support “media-rich” sites, let alone streaming video. Search engines were confined to plain text in the interest of speed. Today, with most internet users connecting by broadband, high-bandwidth implementations of search engines can have expanded abilities. One […]

Section 6 in Chapter 10 talks about how link analysis is applied in modern web search. This online article would be a good source for one who wants to know more about in what direction current link analysis would be improved by major search engines. The article can be found at: http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3628767
In this article, Andrew […]

Before the break, our classroom discussions focused on information networks and search. The Internet allows access to tons of information, however the underlying structure of that information can play a critical role in improving – or making worse – its own usefulness. Search engines such as Google and Yahoo have enjoyed meteoric rises because of […]

Though Googling “Cornell” will return - sure enough - www.cornell.edu as the first result, the PageRank algorithm has limitations that may be better overcome by networks that are more akin to social instead of information networks. A Search Engine Watch blog post, Is Twitter the New Google Alternative?, describes how people are increasingly […]

Larry Lessig, the creator of the Creative Commons and a prominent name in Internet law, recently launched Change Congress. Change Congress is a multipartisan movement created to reform politics by combining existing data and ideas in a “Google-mashup” which will ultimately allow voters to see which candidates support change. The problem which Lessig sees in […]

Digg is a social content website with community-based news articles. “It combines social bookmarking, blogging, and syndication with a form of non-hierarchical, democratic editorial control.” News stories and websites are submitted by users, and then promoted to the home page through a user-based ranking system. This system differs from the hierarchical editorial system that many […]

Ivy League schools now have a new area to compete in - that of online gaming, via GoCrossCampus, or GXC. Developed by four undergrads at Yale and one at Columbia, GXC is a strategy territory-conquest game, much like Risk. The difference is that the battlefield consists of college campuses across the USA. […]

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/do_not_track_legislation_could_change_ad_landscape.php
The article starts by mentioning online advertising including the possible Do Not Track bill and Facebook advertising/privacy issues. The article then gets into push vs. pull marketing. With the Do Not Call list and Spam filters in e-mail the only form of push marketing left is junk mail. This is why online […]

Following up on naota’s post about Google’s algorithms which maximize revenue instead of achieving the optimal social welfare maximization, I will focus on the particular aspect of automatic matching. In late February of 2008, Google informed a group of advertisers that they were selected to participate in the automatic matching beta where Google uses the […]

While during the past few years Google has been the number one search engine, recently, numerous individuals and companies have been looking to change the current search system to develop something more innovative and profitable. One individual who has become fed up with Google’s continuous success is Rich Skrenta. As discussed in the article “Planning […]