A Step Back for Hopefully a Step Forward
Article: https://theintercept.com/2017/10/17/google-search-drug-use-opioid-epidemic/ While Google may have good intentions, it appears that they made steps in the wrong direction in their attempt help shape the drug treatment industry. The Intercept published this article explaining how, at first, people were being pushed into the treatment facilities that earned reps the most money because of the Ad-Words system […]
PageRank in the Ecosystem
PageRank – Google’s algorithm for ranking web pages – can be adapted to determine which species are critical for sustaining ecosystems, and which are not. A specimen with a better “PageRank” would be more embedded into the web of relationships within the ecosystem, and its demise would lead to the collapse of the entire ecosystem. […]
Google Denies Deliberately Lowering Pirate Bay’s PageRank
http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2017/10/google-denies-demoting-the-pirate-bays-search-ranking-in-some-countries/ This article focuses on Google’s PageRank algorithm and highlights a recent issue that was brought up. A torrent company, TorrentFreak, claimed that solely based off the country where one initiated the Google search, different results could occur in terms of Pirate Bay’s PageRank. Specifically the website noticed that it could vary from being the […]
The moral issue of advertising slot selling
https://www.ft.com/content/9be0b974-10e9-11e6-bb40-c30e3bfcf63b Wei Zexi, a 21-year-old Chinese university student, died in April 2016 because of a rare form of cancer called synovial sarcoma. After normal medical treatment offered in public hospitals failed to improve his situation, he turned to the Internet and searched for alternative treatment by using Baidu, the largest web searching engine in […]
Amazon’s Second Headquarters
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/07/technology/amazon-headquarters-north-america.html Recently this past September, Amazon announced that it wanted to build a second headquarters somewhere outside of Seattle. As a result, a huge bidding war began with multiple locations vocalizing their interest. The interest in landing this deal with Amazon rose with its payoff of multiple benefits: thousands of high-paying jobs, tax breaks, tourism, […]
Artificial Intelligence and Socially Optimal Allocation
With news of the future advent of artificial intelligence (AI) looming, many have been faced with coming to terms with the reality of possibly losing their jobs. Well-known scientists like Stephen Hawking even say “AI could spell the end of the human race”(1) while entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg remain quite optimistic. Feelings are indeed mixed […]
Image Search, more ways to find web pages on the World Wise Web
https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/26/ebay-launches-visual-search-tools-that-let-you-shop-using-photos-from-your-phone-or-web/ Today Ebay launched an image search tool alongside their text search tool. Ebay is by no means the first major website to launch such tool as web pages such as Amazon, Google, Pinterest, and Wayfair have already launched image search tool. Alongside this tool, Ebay also launched a another search tool which […]
Ebay Auctions: Bidder and Seller Strategies
The auctions on Ebay are English auctions in which bidders can submit bids until a certain deadline and the bidder with the highest bid wins and pays that bid. At any given time, the highest bid is known. This is different from the sealed auctions that we studied in detail, where bidders do not have […]
Twitter Bots
Social media is everywhere, even GPS apps like Waze and fitness apps like Fitbit have a social media aspect to them. One of the largest social media sites to rise within the last decade. With a monthly active user base larger than the United State’s population, members are able to stay up to date with […]
Why Yahoo Lost and Google Won.
In this article from Forbes Magazine, Gil Press attributes Google’s immense success as a search engine and web pioneer to the company’s achievement in designing the Web the way Tim Berners-Lee invented it to be. Google did much more than simply “organize” the world’s information. Press writes, “Google’s founders were the first to seize on […]
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