Why Some Content Ranks in Google
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/great-content-rank-google/330263/#close Google’s public search liaison, Danny Sullivan, made a statement about if one’s webpage seeks to attain higher rankings for search results, “Search Engine Optimization” or SEO, that webpage must be “great, unique, useful, [and] compelling.” Specifically, Sullivan notes that having more information on a webpage or site will not augment its ranking. In […]
Is Uber’s Matching Market Illegal Price Fixing?
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d3adbv/this-case-will-decide-if-ubers-surge-pricing-is-illegal A recent lawsuit against Uber argues the company’s market-clearing algorithms and surge pricing constitute illegal price fixing. Uber drivers have no say in the pricing of their services, yet Uber claims they are independent contractors instead of employees. This disparity, the lawsuit argues, is illegal price fixing because the law requires independent contractors to […]
Improving YouTube’s Algorithm
These two links connect to the concept of web searches within the World Wide Web, specifically about how hyperlinks allow one to traverse the World Wide Web network to find their desired information. In the first link, a blog written as an official announcement by YouTube, reveals how the recommended videos on YouTube are similar […]
How Authority and Hub Theory Can Be Applied to College Rankings and Students’ Decisions
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/student/news/why-do-students-go-university-and-how-do-they-choose-which-one#survey-answer There has been a constant and ongoing trend in the United States where top high school students chose to attend the highest ranked colleges. In the article I have referenced above, Times Higher Education references a survey of high school students in which 23.5 percent of students state “College is well ranked” as most […]
How Voice Assistants Contribute to the Search Industry
The search industry has been undergoing tremendous changes in the past decade, notably with the rise in popularity of voice assistants. Amazon, Google, Apple, and Microsoft are constantly trying to surpass each other’s achievements to make the perfect voice assistant, an incredibly ambitious and difficult task. Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, and Cortana work using all […]
How Facebook’s Psychological Parsing Practices Will Reshape Targeted Ads
https://www.wired.com/story/facebooks-targeted-ads-are-more-complex-than-it-lets-on/ The rise of big data and the sheer amount of information social media platforms are able to collect on its users have significantly changed the nature of advertisements and more specifically, targeted ads. One of the new advertising techniques made possible by overt data collection is the over-segmentation of user data. This leads to […]
A Comparison of Harmonic Centrality and PageRank
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/harmonic-centrality-pagerank/283985/ In class, we learned about the PageRank algorithm, which is used as a measure of centrality to determine the importance of websites. The PageRank algorithm uses a node’s neighborhood to determine its importance. Essentially, the more important pages that point to a given page A, then the more important page A becomes. This article […]
Game Theory and Bacteria
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191009093948.htm This article describes how a group of researchers at Washington State University are developing a unique application for graph theory: identifying antibiotic resistant genes in bacteria. The two researchers, one from the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the other from the School of Global Animal Health, combined their distinct backgrounds to […]
Uber’s Unique Type of Market Clearing
Uber’s Plan to Lose Money on Each Transaction and Make It Up in Volume, Annotated The article tries to explain Uber’s unique business model and offers an analysis to why it might not be sustainable in the long run. The optimality of market clearing prices is defined as “prices: For any set of market-clearing prices, […]
Simulations in a Real Context
https://www.pon.harvard.edu/daily/business-negotiations/two-examples-of-the-winners-curse-in-business-negotiations-microsofts-acquisition-of-yammer-and-the-purchase-of-edvard-munchs-the-scream/ In the Harvard article cited above, the author discussed the difference between private and common value assets in the context of the Winner’s Curse. This topic piqued my interest because in lecture, we tend to describe real life situations like auctions and bargaining scenarios through mathematical simulations that stray far enough from the […]
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