eBay and WSJ
http://www.wsj.com/articles/ebay-makes-bid-for-younger-shoppers-with-revamped-image-1476869406
When I first sat down to write this post, I was brainstorming ideas for what to write about. I Googled “auctions,” because it was the first topic from class that came to mind. An article about eBay popped up. Perfect, I thought, I can write about the auction concepts we learned about in class and apply them to eBay. As I read on, however, I realized the article displayed a more obvious example of what we have learned about it class: it demonstrated the behavior of web pages that link to one another, strong components, and the legitimacy of each web page.
This article, posted on the Wall Street Journal’s site, was one of the first to pop up as a search result on Google. I was previously familiar with eBay and the Wall Street Journal—familiar as in I knew their names and main purposes, I don’t frequent their sites or anything—so I decided to click on the article. As I scrolled through, I noticed that wsj.com links to itself several times, along with Amazon, Target, Wal-Mart, and Apple. From a consumer’s perspective, these sites are familiar and reliable, because they are well-known names. If someone weren’t familiar with the Wall Street Journal or eBay, they might recognize these other sites and realize that wsj.com and eBay are legitimate sites, if they are referencing and being compared to such well-known companies. This legitimacy relates to the hub and authority update rules, in which each site’s “scores” increase as they link to more reliable sites or have more reliable sites linking to them. WSJ’s validity is probably how its site popped up so high in the search results in the first place.