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Crawling Across The Web

As we discussed in class, the pagerank algorithm is used by Google to rank pages in it’s search results, using a variety of factors – including hub and authority scores based on the number of links to and from sites.  However, how does Google collect all this information about the state of the world wide […]

Facebook, Emotions, Stories and Personalized Advertising.

News Article: http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/2015/oct/29/facebook-reactions-emotional-youtube-google-ads Facebook wowed it’s over billion active users lately through the announcement of its (in trial phase) “reactions”: a set of cute ‘emojis’ that users can choose to attach emotions to posts rather than just ‘liking’ them. The new buttons represent love, laughter, sassy smiles, shock and annoyance, and what the social network […]

Sealed-Price Auctions in Real Estate

Sealed-bid auctions are becoming more popular all over the country. These are auctions where the buyers write down how much money they are willing to spend on a product and do not see how much other buyers are offering for the same object. The buyers offer their true value for the product. There are two […]

A second price auction is an auction in which the winner pays just slightly above the amount of the second highest bid, because that is the lowest price that would have won. This means that the dominant strategy for each bidder is to bid the highest price that they are willing to pay, or their […]

Facebook Maximizes Long Term Revenue

Facebook’s online ads seek to maximize long term revenue. By only showing the ads people want to see, Facebook ensures a better experience on its News Feed. This idea is based on the fact that if advertisers get more return, they will spend more. After all, this makes sense because showing ads to consumers who […]

Equality on Search Engines

As mentioned in class previously, PageRank (and the many other secretive algorithms that base off of PageRank), are used to rank pages that can essentially be displayed on a search engine such as Google. When the website or search material is based off of informative or research based material, it works well in providing a good set […]

Impact of Fake Reviews

In addition to relevance, geography and time, ratings and reviews also play key roles in defining search results. Websites such as Yelp and TripAdvisor are search engines for a specific category that rely heavily on ratings and reviews. Taking account of this, some businesses try to “buy their way in” to the search results, not […]

Pay for Ad-Free YouTube

Starting today, YouTube is launching YouTube Red where you pay $9.99 per month for removing ads and a subscription to YouTube Music. The money made directly from viewers instead of marketing will go to help support the creators. This change greatly effects  companies relying on those 5 to 30 second ads before the video is […]

Modeling Traffic, Gridlock and Bottlenecks

After infamous “bridgegate” scandal, where the administration of the Governor of New Jersey Chris Christie planned a “bridge gridlock”, the issue of how traffic is caused should be examined. It is firstly important to not the distinction between gridlock and bottlenecks. A bottleneck is when there is some slowing zone that causes cars to build […]

Limitations of PageRank

A natural question to ask when learning an algorithm is, “What are the limitations?” The PageRank algorithm crawls pages on the Internet and assigns each page a score depending on its “importance” in the structure of the Internet. A greater score implies greater authority on a topic or key phrase. At one point an essential […]

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