Facebook and the VCG Auction
In class, we have learned about the VCG auction for advertisements. It works by maximizing the total benefit experienced by everyone by giving the most lucrative ad spaces the those who would benefit the most from it. It then charges the advertiser the “harm” that it causes by taking that specific spot, kind of like the […]
Search Engine Optimization
Over the past ten to fifteen years, the sheer amount of underlying sophistication behind the growth and development of search engine optimization has increased at an exponential rate. Whereas search engines from ten to fifteen years ago implemented searches with comparatively simple approaches, usually heavily involving Boolean and logical operators, the evolution of search engine […]
How did PageRank ruin the web?
Ever gotten a crappy email asking for links? Blame PageRank. Ever had garbage comments with link drops? Blame PageRank. Ever had to ferret out the how and why you should make use of the nofollow attribute on links? Blame PageRank. In 2014, Google finally stopped showing the PageRank value for users. PageRank, which intended to […]
Network Effect and Large Networks
Today’s era is remarkable with booming technologies, and these technologies have made it possible to connect people globally. The Internet has created this enormous web or network that connects people globally. The internet has a lot of value because of the huge number of users in it. This is called the “Network Effect” and it […]
The Effect of Bidding on Brand Terms
A study on Bing Ads, travel and retail specifically, has been conducted to analyze the effect when brand ads were or were not present on a person’s search page. After analyzing over 3 million retail desktop impressions and 400,000 travel desktop impressions, Bing Ads has concluded that if an advertiser bided on its own brand […]
To Support or Not To Support: Information Cascade in the 2016 Election
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/why-republicans-are-flip-flopping-on-their-endorsements/503930/ If there is one thing that has been consistently true during this 2016 Presidential Election race, it’s that by and large…just about everything is inconsistent. While sounding very much like an oxymoron, it really does seem like in any given time or current state when it comes to public & political opinion regarding Hillary […]
The Value of Advertisement Listings
http://www.ibtimes.com/ubers-new-partnership-yext-will-make-getting-certain-destinations-easiers-2424225 There exist algorithms like VSG and GSP that try to find market clearing prices in a set of “buyers” and “sellers” where sellers are advertisement slots and buyers are advertisements. When calculating prices we assume simplified situations involving clickthrough rates and intrinsic values of advertisers for each slot. While this may demonstrate the algorithms […]
Information Cascade in Amazon Reviews
Amazon is one of the world’s largest online markets, offering a range of products from trendiest shoes to the latest technology. For a buyer, reviews play a large role in whether or not they want to purchase a given product. Many time retailers will entice buyers to give stellar reviews in exchange for a discounted […]
Link Rot: A Problem for the Supreme Court and the Web
Link rot is the phenomenon where links on a website lead to websites and other web resources that have become unavailable. This is due to reasons like the domain name changing, domains not being renewed, purposeful removal of web content, etc. All of this creates a situation where search engines sometimes give useless results that […]
Using PageRank to Rank Universities by Influence
Considered by many as a key invention contributing to Google’s dominance, PageRank is one of the most influential algorithms in the tech world. The intuition behind it, as we have learned in CS 2850, is simple: in a network or graph, a node is important if other important nodes point to it. Although it was […]
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