CPSC 110-08: Computing with Mobile Phones

Reading: Blown to Bits, Chapter 1

Needles in the Haystack

Notes

• Finding a long lost relative after 70 years.

• Library and Bazaar When the web first started there were a few producers and many consumers (library). Today there are many of both (bazaar).

• Search is the new form of control over information.

• Search is the new form of control over information.

• How does Google's search engine find its results so fast?

  Background

  1. Gather information -- (spider crawls the web).
  2. Keep copies -- (spider downloads pages to a DB).
  3. Build an index -- (almost every word on the page).

  Foreground

  1. Understand the query -- (machine learning algorithms).
  2. Determine the relevance of each possible result (compare query words with document words).
  3. Rank the results (PageRank algorithm).
  4. Present the results (with links, etc.)

• Who pays? Google's Ad Words auction lets advertisers post a small link next to the Google search results.

  Search is biased. Different search engines give different results. Search results can be manipulated (Google bomb). Our search queries can be tracked. Search engines don't see everything.

  China: Government control of search. Will it last?