The Wikipedia Game
http://www.news.com.au/technology/the-wikipedia-article-philosophy-game-in-numbers/story-e6frfro0-1226119845491 Everyone has played the Wikipedia game before –picking a random start page with a random end page in mind, to see who can get there in the least amount of time/clicks –but the question is, is it really possible to always get from point X to point Y? Are all pages on Wikipedia part […]
Social Influence in Networks
Earlier in class we learnt about hubs and authorities, and how search engines score them according to their link structure – in general, the more connected they are to important nodes, the higher score they get. A similar scoring method goes on in our personal lives as well, amongst our social contacts. Each of us […]
Testing Google’s Panda algorithm: CNET analysis
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20054797-281.html Google continuously makes changes to their search and pagerank algorithms. Most of the time these changes go under the radar and are incremental, but on occasion the update has major effects in the internet search industry. The above article (linked) discusses one of Google’s major and recent changes to their searching algorithm, referred to […]
Gaming PageRank
In class, we discussed the PageRank algorithm used on networks of web pages to analyze the relative importance of each website. For each site, the PageRank is determined by looking at the PageRank of the incoming links, or the sites that link to the page in question. After several iterations of this formula, the numbers […]
Will Google Eventually Change to a Paid Search Result Model?
As Google continually alters its search algorithm to optimize the user’s experience, a decrease in traffic through natural search results, results that are not sponsored, and an increase in investment by companies to manipulate their position in search results indicate that Google might benefit from a switch to a paid search result model. In recent […]
Social Networks as a Humanist Way of Visualization
http://names.911memorial.org/#lang=en_US&page=about&id=0 http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=september-11-memorial The 911 memorial has two water pools surrounded by visualizations of the names of those people who died in the terrorist attackson September 11, 2001. Unlike the traditional way of listing people’s name alphabetically, it has a unique way of arranging people names. There are two major sources of information that were used […]
Defensive Trade-Offs in Baseball
Baseball is filled with bits of conventional wisdom—don’t make the first out at third base; the second hitter must be able to handle the bat; pitchers must bat ninth, and countless others. Among these unwritten rules is the concept of the “no-doubles defense,” an idea designed to minimize the risk of allowing extra-base hits (i.e., […]
Buying Popularity on the Web
In recent years, Google has dominated the web as the biggest internet search engine. How relevant and popular Google thinks your website is can be the most important factor in getting traffic. Depending on what kind of site you host, this can mean how widely your political candidate is endorsed, how many people read your […]
The Superior Panda Algorithm
URL-http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20054797-281.html Google is the leading search engine favored by a majority of Internet users, even though the Google search engine is relatively new. Within the span of a few years, Google has achieved significant popularity with its accurate and precise results that closely fit the user’s intention with its Panda Algorithm. The Panda Algorithm that […]
Yelp vs. Alfred
With advances in smart phone technology and smart phone applications, it is becoming increasingly easier for people to compare two options and decide which one to pick. One of the most common dilemmas I know that I have are trying to decide where to eat when I want to try somewhere I have no gone […]
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