http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2008/03/18/when_google_does_evil/
(6 Pages - see links at bottom to progress)
This article discusses many of the details of Google’s ad auction service that do not get covered in Econ 204 lecture. Recently, advertisements on Google have been receiving less clicks, which Google claims is an attempt to get rid of “unintentional” clicks and provide higher quality […]

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 […]

The world’s second most-used search engine, Yahoo, is announcing a move to semantic search. Traditional search engines analyze a web page’s relevance to the search terms by analyzing the quantity of links to and from the web page. However, semantic search attempts to capture the context of data on a web page to understand the […]

It is well known that the cost of products decreases over time. In most cases, the products are quickly replaced by new products. The new products are better and bump up the price long enough for the next product to come along. There are some things that are not replaced. Postal […]

As television broadcasters move to digital transmission systems, mandated by Congress through legislation signed into law on February 8, 2006 (known as the Digital Television Transition and Public Safety Act), frequency space that was previously used for television signals will be made available for other purposes. Analog broadcasters will have to stop transmitting their […]

Have you ever gone to the movies and worried about who you’re going to sit next to?  This comic illustrates the common dilemma moviegoers face when filling the theatre aisles.

www.xkcd.com/173
The complex relationships between each pair of people in a group can be reflected in an acquaintance graph, such as the one shown above in the comic. […]

In class we began talking about how Google ranked their pages, but did not get into the details of how any of this is performed underneath the surface.  I became interested in how this was actually carried through and I found some interesting finds.  According to Wikipedia’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank) article on PageRank, ranking pages is actually […]

The semantic web is the target of a great deal of skepticism, but some projects are starting to make use of its principles to some of the most valuable resources on the internet even more valuable.  DBpedia, a part of the LinkingOpenData project, connects wikipedia with a number of other sources such as MusicBrainz, Project Gutenburg, flickr […]

I found this paper a while ago through another blog I read a lot, Gizmodo. It talkx about how members of Facebook and MySpace are divided by their real-life social status. Facebook tends to cater more towards what author calls “good” kids. These are college-bound, preppy  teenagers. MySpace users are usually part of the lower class society, […]

The following information was explained by Kate Ehrlich of IBM Research during her talk to the Information Science department on February 22, 2008. Details are copyright IBM.
In engineering projects, communication is essential between people who are working on related tasks. Similar to this idea is the idea of triadic closure, which states that […]