Google and Ye Shall Find???

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Class discussion:  We will finish our study of the principal methods search engines use to get documents, index them, and provide search results.  Bring your questions on the technical material we discussed last week.  We will then consider the economics of search.  Battelle raises many issues in Chapters 5, 6, and 7 as he describes the new economics of search.  Consider the magnitude of the change in business model brought about by click-through ads.  What do we gain and lose from this model?  Can this model survive click-through spam?  Given Google's AdSense, is Google a media company or an advertisement company, i.e. is its primary business the delivery of content or of ads?  Is news becoming a commodity?  These are just some of the questions to consider.  Bring your own issues for discussion as well.

Written assignment due this week:  The technical problems and the blog assignment are described in separate documents: Assignment 3 technical problems(pdf), and Assignment 3 blog assignment (html).

Reading for discussion today:

References for technical material:

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Class discussion:  Battelle covers a lot of history in Chapters 3-7.  In our focus on how search works now, we haven't paid much attention to why earlier Web search engines failed.  We already know one reason: Google introduced a better ranking algorithm.  But economics also played a role: other search engines either could not become profitable or could not stay profitable.  Re-examine Chapters 3-6 with an eye to the economic factors involved.  Where did economics play a role and how?  Also consider the issues I raised for last week that we did not discuss fully:  Consider the magnitude of the change in business model brought about by click-through ads.  What do we gain and lose from this model?  Can this model survive click-through spam?  Given Google's AdSense, is Google a media company or an advertisement company, i.e. is its primary business the delivery of information or of ads? Does it matter?
 
By the time we reach Chapter 7 of  Battelle, he is raising issues of more fundamental changes in the economics of our society.  What are the effects on retailing?  Does trademarking become obsolete?    What is the state of the news media?  (We will come back to issues of intellectual property again in a week or two.  Intellectual property is not exculsively an economic issue, but the debate is certainly driven by economics.)  

What issues related to search and economics do you find most important?

Written assignment due this week:  Please visit the Assignment 4 page (pdf).

Reading for discussion today:

References for technical material:

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Class discussion: We will begin the class with final thoughts from last week.  I have listed Battelle Chapter 9, discussing Google's IPO, for discussion. (We will return to Chapter 8 after fall break.)  Does Google's IPO process say anything about how fundamental a change we are seeing in the economics of search? 

Our first new topic for the week is the computing resources needed for search.  The third of three components of  Google's success is their exceptional managment of their computing resources - getting the most for their investment.   A key to this is distributing the computing the search engine needs to do among many, many computers.  Think about how all the activities of a search engine can be shared among many computers.

After covering computing resources, we will come back to the quaility of search results.  Think about the kinds of searches that have been easiest and those that have been most difficult for you.   Do the easy searches share common features?  the difficult searches?  What improvements to search - either new options for specifying the search or new ways to rank or present the results - would be helpful?  We discussed trusting the results of search a bit earlier in the semester;  what issues in trusting results would you like to revisit or introduce?  

For our discussion of improving search engine results, we will start considering what search engines other than Google have to offer that is different, beginning with some well-known techniques that Google chooses not to implement.

No written assignment due this week, but:
Final paper topic description due Monday, November 5, 2007 at 5pm.  See Project Guidelines online.

Reading for discussion today:

References for technical material: