i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

As we have seen in class, the frequency of a term is not enough to infer the quality of the document that contains it. Recently, we have had the case of a  Brooklyn eyewear merchant who goaded customers into posting scathing online reviews, with a better position on Google searches. For that reason, Google has modified the search for that query to 'punish' that particular result. Is this good or bad?

We were talking in class recently about Google's book scanning efforts in France.  Here is an article on the matter.

Anyone ever had experience organizing information into the synthesized format of a wikipedia article?

 you can get a lot of people to agree on a few things, and a few people to agree on a lot of things.  but you can't get a lot of people to agree on a lot of things.    

As described in the lecture, standards are important vehicles for companies to win in a competitive market and to "take it all". Standards are network goods: The perceived utility of a user increases with the number of users to also use the same standard on their devices, software etc. Take Windows, a DVD or the Internet Protocol. This is because standard compliance allows interoperability, higher performance and increased reliability as well it enables new features and services.

 http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/08/the-laws-of-information-chemis.html