Game Theory in Rugby Could Overturn Conventional Play Strategy
In many rugby games the difficult decision of what to do with a penalty arises. There are a number of options as to what can be done in the event of a penalty including: slotting the ball if it’s on the touchline, going for a scrum, or kicking the ball into touch for a lineout. […]
PageRank and the Downfall of Quality Content
We’ve all heard of the infamous PageRank algorithm that Google employs to rank the webpages returned by it’s search results. Of course, Google intended to make it foolproof, fair and useful to the user, but did it in fact turn out to be so? PageRank works on the principle of Link Analysis, mainly taking into […]
How Google Makes its Money
Preface: Recently, our class has looked at the web as a directed graph. We talked about how webpages point to each other using hyperlinks, and then talked a little bit about how search engines, namely Google, might search through web pages and list them in order of importance. However, as we were talking about this, […]
Are Google’s algorithms sexist?
A recent article in The Washington Post presented a criticism towards Google’s advertisements. After it was discovered that a Google image search for “CEO” returns only images of white men, researchers began to explore other algorithmic biases online. A hypothesis was formed that Men tend to be exposed to more high-paying executive job advertisements than women. […]
How Google Won the Search Engine War
Article: http://searchengineland.com/google-won-pr-battle-seo-thats-good-thing-232761 How Google Won the Search Engine War During the early days of the internet, search engines like Google developed a distinctly “us vs. them” mentality when dealing with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) firms. These firms would often use shady tactics such as keyword-stuffing and link farming to achieve high rankings for client pages. […]
Extending PageRank to the Scientific Community
PageRank is the foundation of one of the most influential companies of this century. It controls how likely we are to see or find any given piece of information on the whole Internet. Therefore, it goes without saying that PageRank is an incredibly successful and sophisticated tool. Because of both its pervasive and powerful nature, […]
Search Engine Optimization and Google’s Battle against It
http://searchengineland.com/google-won-pr-battle-seo-thats-good-thing-232761 In class we talked about how Google primarily derives revenue from performing what is essentially a second-price auction on its keywords and advertisement slots corresponding to each query. In this way, Google and the companies who want to buy these slots create a win-win situation. For the companies, they each get the […]
How a Megabyte Can Make a Difference
In the blog post “Page Weight Matters” by Chris Zacharias, Zacharias discusses YouTube’s Project Feather. In 2009, YouTube had an average page size of 1.2MB. While many saw this as acceptable, other engineers saw this size as ridiculous. There was no need to force users to load that much data just to watch a video. […]
The Lange Model of Socialism
http://cupola.gettysburg.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1033&context=ger https://libcom.org/library/capitalism-socialism-defence-paresh-chattopadhyay The recent rise to popularity of Bernie Sanders – the socialist senator from Vermont – has brought the idea of socialism into the national spotlight. Many Americans, however, remain ignorant to socialist ideas and believe that socialism could not be economically viable. Socialism describes a broad family of systems in which people […]
TrustRank
Some of the ways people try to improve their pages’ rankings involves creating web spam, pages that are intended not for human use but for manipulating search engines. Search engines are supposed to help the user find information on the Web and so must filter out spam and other uninteresting results. Spam can be detected […]
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