Download The World of Google - UT School of Information

The World of Google
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What’s the impact of Google?
Was Google lucky or smart?
What were some of the big ideas that made
Google successful?
What would you have done differently (even
with perfect hindsight)?
Is it all about the (Web) advertising?
A New Business Model
• Bill Gross
- Lifelong entrepreneur making
computing easier
- Magellan, the PC search app
- Knowledge Adventure
- IdeaLab
• GoTo.com / Overture
- Search matters in a world of
Portals
- Not about any kind of traffic on
your site
Ads really comes to the Web
• Portals sites with banner ads
- Lots of views, but not much relevance or clicks
• Matching query terms mostly with content
- Less relevance, less searching, less ad clicks
• How can you differentiate between good
traffic and bad? (p105)
- Buying traffic for ad networks / user visits
- All visitors (mostly) the same
• Tie the traffic to the type of business
- Use the search engine to work with ads, not just
page content
Search gets (more) relevant
• Search uses relevancy in new ways
- The same traditional IR concept, but flipped to
focus on ads, not pages
• What’s the best way to be better?
- Human-created directories (Yahoo!) ?
- System-centered algorithms (AltaVista, Google) ?
- Add accountability to the search process ?
• Putting a price on search
- Charge the advertiser to list & rank their content
- Use scale & arbitrage in the system
• Computers are perfect for this
Re-inventing the wheel on the Web
• Many industries have been built by using
technology to change the scale, which
changes the business
- The Industrial Revolution
• The scale of the Web: content & users might
mean that advertisers might pay enough to
get enough content for users to have enough
to see if they searched
- Not as easy as it might sound?
• How do you get advertisers to pay?
- Free (or really cheap) samples
- Auctions (to promote fair play)
Launching GoTo
• Different than the traditional Web ethos
- Ethics, editorial trust & volume problems
- (Do we still have these now?)
• The search engine model as the yellow pages
- Finely tuned & more dynamic
• Brought (more) measurement & market dynamics to
search
- Helped create the modern business of search
• Not just on GoTo, but also syndicated on other’s sites
- This is Google’s model (in a nutshell) now
• AdSense - ads on your site
• AdWords - your ads on Google’s site(s)
• The Search Economy is born
- Pay per click & CPM
Here comes Google
• Larry Page & Sergey Brin
• Omid Kordestani
• Embrace advertising, but
do it better
- Text ads
- Linked to query keywords
• Modified CPM
• Changes in the
marketplace drives
changes in Web
advertising
AdWords
• “Have a credit card and 5 minutes?”
- ”Get your ad on google today”
• Separate ads from content
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No graphical (blinking) ads
Established trust in results vs. ads
Kept the ad process clear (now expected)
Originally CPM
Eventually PPC
• How would other information-providers
compare & contrast to these models?
Google’s Progress
• The economy and the company grew back
together
• Marketing Google
- Don’t be Evil
- Instead of Advertising Google
• Working with others
- Eric Schmidt
- Integrating into the Web
- “Googling” as a verb
• News & the database of intentions
The Search Economy
• The ubiquity of search
- Not so much about browsing now
- Tools work with, not against search
• Search Engine Optimization
- The Google Dance
- Building and ranking
- Web spam goes (more) pro
• How do you automate editorial judgement?
• What about the non-digital world?
• What about non-commercial interests &
content?
Google’s Big Issues
• Trust & advertising
• The WORLD Wide Web
- Censorship (China)
• Click Fraud
• Privacy
- & permanence
• Product integration
- Email & privacy
• Working with the government
- Subpoenas, DMCA, Copyright & Trademarks
Google Today, Google Tomorrow
• What’s next for Google?
- What would you do?
- What products & features do you wish Google (or
someone) had for you?
• Engineering better search
• Wealth & Growth’s effects
• Do you think there is any competition?
- What other search tools or similar products do you
use?
The Perfect Search
• Ideas for good search still exceed current
search technology
• What does perfect search look like?
- Is perfection personal or communal?
• Search Everywhere, Search Anywhere
• Search Everything
- The invisible Web
- Does more online mean better search?
• Clickstreams & you
- What affects you & what doesn’t (yet)
Search as the new Interface
• The Web makes IR an everyday activity
• Search Engines & tasks
• Search Interfaces & you
- The clickstream (again)
• The openness of the Web changes everything
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Access
Technological progress
Expectation
Credibility
Networks and Networking
Semantic Search
• More structure enables better understanding
(of content)
• Tagging & folksonomies
• Your (desktop) content
- A different kind of search?
• Personal content - blogs
- Another different kind of search?
- Friends (of friends) vs. everyone?
• WebFountain, complex metadata &
metasearch
The Search Comments?
Assignments
• Read weekly Primary Readings & Participate
in class discussions 10%
- 1 page summaries
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Re-design Search Results interface 10%
Web (log) analytics 20%
“Google 2010” (5 page paper) 10%
Web Information Retrieval System Evaluation
& Presentation 20%
• Main Project or Paper 30%
Re-design Search Results interface
• Choose a search engine (not Google) and re-design
the query AND result page interfaces
- Snap, Live, Ask, Technorati, Clusty, & many others…
• Discuss what search features are and their interfaces
- Highlight the good & the bad (or hard to understand or use)
- Use your own perspective as a novice user or habitual user
of the search engine
• Sketch, Photoshop &/or re-build the HTML pages to
show your improved interface designs
- Explain why you made the interface (& feature) changes
- Illustrate how people would use the new interface
• Compare to other search engines or search tools &
interfaces to give context to your re-design
System Evaluation & Presentation
- 5 page written evaluation of a Web IR System
- technology overview (how it works)
- a brief history of the development of this type of
system (why it works better)
- intended uses for the system (who, when, why)
- (your) examples or case studies of the system in
use & its overall effectiveness
Projects and/or Papers Overview
• How can (Web) IR be better?
- Better IR models
- Better User Interfaces
• More to find vs. easier to find
• Scriptable applications
• New interfaces for applications
• New datasets for applications