Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Recap for Evaluation

During this first part of our course, we have studied search engines, their underlying mechanism, characteristics and some of the potential implications on individuals and society of their manipulation.
The topics that we have covered include:
• Basic knowledge of the Internet, servers and clients, protocols, data packets, IP, DNS.
• The nature of search engines, their four main characteristics, indexing algorithms, what makes a search engine better than others.
• Validating sources.
• A brief glimpse into the nature of search engine algorithms. Search Engine Optimization. Pagerank. Google bombing.
• How search engines can be manipulated and their potential effects on individuals and society.
• User constructed search engine queries, search engine design criteria, tendencies, differences between novice and advanced users.
WARNING: I will not be doing this in successive units, since one of the learning objectives of this course is to be able to distinguish relevant and non-relevant information as well as developing the ability to sort out data that is not necessarily in written form.

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