The Power of Ads
https://medium.com/better-marketing/google-1-position-matters-less-than-before-9966a51dee8a The author of this medium article explains how Google is pushing to gain even more money because they prioritize more ad results on the top of the page than organic search results. For example, if you google ‘digital marketing’, all the top results that are able to be seen on screen are ads. To […]
Does Google have a ranking bias against conservatives?
Source: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/06/08/google-rewards-reputable-reporting-not-left-wing-politics Conservative pundits have long asserted that Google’s searching algorithm has a liberal skew that disadvantages right-wing consumers, but is that true? By analyzing how web search is conducted and the way pages get ranked one can easily see that Google’s bias skews towards credible sources more than it skews against conservative news. So […]
Tinder Created an Interactive Show – Gen Z Loves It
https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/23/media/tinder-interactive-show-swipe-night/index.html Kerry Flynn wrote an article for CNN business titled “Tinder Created an Interactive Show – Gen Z Loves It” which describes the Tinder app’s launch of “Swipe Night”, a four-part short form video series of original content – the first of its kind. The episodes were interactive as they asked the users to make […]
Google-bombing – Manipulating PageRank Algorithm and Solutions
As we learned in class, Google has a secret algorithm of Information Retrieval (IR) for its search engine. In addition to the in-link counting we did in class, Page Rank also considers link text used. If a majority of links use a specific phrase when linking to a target page, querying that phrase will include […]
Campaign Advertisements in 2020
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/14/us/politics/democrats-political-facebook-ads.html The 2020 election is the first race where Facebook is releasing their advertisement spending data publicly. This gives the public insight on how much money each candidate is spending on Facebook ads, along with who they are targeting the advertisements towards. This is significant in the advertising world nowadays, where advertisers are trying […]
Uber Ride-Sharing: A Matching Market?
https://marketplace.uber.com/matching Matching riders and drivers is a core component of what makes Uber so successful. One way of matching riders and drivers is to match the closest driver with the closest rider. In other words, matching drivers with riders within close physical proximity of each other. However, Uber explains that this is not always the […]
Truthful Bidding in English Auctions
https://www.auction.com/blog/going-once-going-twice-sold-how-to-win-an-online-real-estate-auction/ In class, we’ve spent a lot of time discussing dominant strategies for different kinds of auctions. First price auctions, for example, buyers should bid less than their value to ensure payoff is above 0, while truthful bidding should be used in second price sealed bid and VCG auctions. Unfortunately, auctions and […]
Google and Page Rank
Google and Page Rank https://www.link-assistant.com/news/google-page-rank-2019.html This article explains how the history of page rank and Google’s use of page rank. Page rank was created by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University. It is an algorithm that gives each web page a score of importance regarding the quality and quantity of its links. […]
The self-destructing auction
https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/7/17947744/banksy-ballon-girl-artwork-self-destructed-sothbys Last year, one of Banksy’s most famous pieces of artwork was being auctioned off. The Girl with Balloon sold for a whopping $1,4 million. The moment it was sold to the highest bidder however, the art magically began to shred. This of course rendered the art worthless. This kind of auction is unbeknownst to any […]
When does PageRank fail?
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep16181 Entitled “Ranking nodes in growing networks: When PageRank fails,” this article by Mariani et al. discusses the limitations of the PageRank algorithm on certain dynamic, time-dependent networks. PageRank, which is the cornerstone of the Google search algorithm, is based on the idea that “a node is important if it is pointed [to] by other […]
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