SIMS 141:   Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business
   Fall 2005
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Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business
SIMS 141

Assignment 2

Due October 28 at 5pm PST.
Please do your own work.

Prof. Hal Varian lectured on search advertising:

    (1a) In what critical way do search-based ads differ from banner ads? (One sentence; do not answer in terms of what they look like.)

    (1b) For both Yahoo (also referred to as Overture) and Google ads, advertisers bid on which user query words trigger the showing of a given ad (also called an "impression"). Let's say that variable "K" is the number of bidders who get their ads shown when someone searches on a particulary query term on either search engine. Of these K winners, for Yahoo ads, the highest bidder gets the top page position among the ads for a given query. For Google ads, advertisers' bids alone do not determine the page position that the ad will appear in. For Google ads, what other criterion determines which ads get promoted to a higher position on the search results page? (One sentence.)

    (1c) In Vickery auctions, the highest bidder pays the price bid by the second-highest bidder (plus a small fixed amount more). Why do search engines do ad auctions this way? (1-3 sentences; you don't need to understand the math to answer this.)

Jason Schultz lectured on Intellectual Property:

    (2a) Jason Schultz talked about issues surrounding trademark issues and ad keyword search. What was the outcome of the GEICO case? What aspects of the goals of trademark law motivated this outcome? (1 paragraph)

    (2b) According to Jason Schultz, in one case a court has found that image search as currently done by web search engines is legal. Name three good arguments supporting the legality of image search as currently done by Yahoo and Google. Name one good argument against it. (1 paragraph)

Dr. Sue Dumais lectured on Desktop Search:

    (3a) According to Dr. Sue Dumais, how do user goals in desktop search differ from web search? (2-3 sentences)

    (3b) Dr. Dumais' research found that users searching on information that they'd already seen prefer to order the results chronologically rather than by rank order. Why might this be? (1-3 sentences)

    (3c) She also found that different types of files were best expressed by different definitions of time. What were three different notions of time associated with different file types? (1 sentence)

    (3d) In which two situations did her research find that the experimental desktop search interface failed? (1 sentence)

    (3e) How did her group evaluate their system? (1 paragraph)

Dr. Mark Najork lectured on Web Spam:

    (4a) What is web spam? Describe two quite distinct types of web spam. (1 paragraph)

    (4b) How does web spam differ from email spam? (1-3 sentences)

Choose one of the following two questions (5a or 5b) to answer:

    (5a) The Onion is a humor news magazine specializing in parodies. (According to Wikipedia, "parody is a form of satire that imitates another work of art in order to ridicule it. It can also be used to poke affectionate fun at the work in question.")

    The Onion recently published a fake news article called Google Announces Plan To Destroy All Information It Can't Index. Write a paragraph analyzing why this article is funny? Why do the authors joke that Google will eliminate all forms of information that it cannot index? (1-3 paragraphs)

    (5b) In your opinion, what was the most interesting thing that Sergey Brin said in his lecture, and why? (1-3 paragraphs)