Google’s new algorithm recognizes that timeliness is money
http://www.ocala.com/article/20111103/ZNYT05/111033012/1001/news01?p=2&tc=pg Have you ever tried to find out the score of a football game while it’s still going on by simply typing it into Google? If you have, I’m sure you know how frustrating it is that the top results are from games that were played over a week ago. Well Google has finally done […]
WireDoo, M.C. Hammer’s New Search Engine
Both of the articles below outline a new search engine, WireDoo. The first, found on New York Times, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/19/m-c-hammer-announces-wiredoo-a-search-start-up/?scp=8&sq=search%20engines&st=cse, drew my attention because of the headline- “M.C. Hammer Announces WireDoo…”. That M.C. Hammer was announcing a new type of serach engine piqued my interest. At first, I envisioned something similar to Google, a very tech-y […]
PageRank, Wikipedia, and Google
http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2007/01/campaign-to-reduce-wikipedias-pagerank-to-zero.html The advent of Wikipedia–consistently ranked one of the top 10 most popular websites–marked a powerful transformation in the way that people access information. Content on Wikipedia can be created and/or edited by anyone with Internet access. This might allow for some biases to sneak into an article every now and again, but on the […]
Bing vs. Google
https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2011/09/20/you-are-the-company-you-keep/ http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/US http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/2011/05/16/news-announcement-may-17.aspx http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/205842 http://howmanyarethere.net/how-many-search-engines-are-there/ A previous blog post on this site entitled “You are the company you keep” explores the structural balance between the social networks that individuals are a part of and the decisions that individuals make. The conclusion that the post eventually comes to is that structure balance is maintained only when […]
Patents
Over the summer, as I was driving, I listened to a great segment on NPR about patents, specifically the problems patent trolls pose to creativity and small firms. Firstly, the basic definition of a patent troll is a firm that buys and hoards patents simply to sue other firms that are using these patents. These […]
Information Cascade
http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv26n4/v26n4-2.pdf Information cascade refers to the phenomenon that people would make choices based on the actions of other people, sometimes regardless of their own private information. The article above uses this phenomenon to explain why public opinion changes rapidly. One theory the author mentions is the theory developed by Timur Kuran. Kuran proposes that people […]
Comparing Facebook EdgeRank and Google PageRank
http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/22/facebook-edgerank/ This article explains how Facebook’s EdgeRank formula chooses what content is displayed on a user’s news feed. Although their contexts are quite different, Facebook EdgeRank and Google PageRank have similar purposes and methods. Google’s PageRank algorithm is able to produce a relevant list of web pages for a given user’s search within fractions of […]
If Variety Is The Spice Of Life, Life May Be Getting A Little Less Spicy
Is herd mentality a good thing? Some might say that it leads to the best state of social equilibrium, while others might argue that people become overly enchanted with popular trends. There is no right answer to this question, but it is an interesting topic for research. In class, we did a small-scale experiment that […]
Why Facebook Doesn’t Charge
Facebook, currently the popular social networking site (at least in the US), is without a doubt one of the sites that have highly impacted and defined our lives. And like all online social services that have achieved “critical mass,” or roughly the number of users necessary to achieve the the tipping point mentioned in lecture […]
Game Theory and the NBA Lockout
For those that do not follow basketball, there currently is a lockout that is postponing the 2011-2012 National Basketball Association season. The season that was originally slated to begin only days ago should not start for another few weeks due to a large collective bargaining dispute between the NBA’s players and team owners. These negotiations […]
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