Week 7 reading reactions

Hawking, David. "How Things Work: Web Search Engines: Part 1." Computer June 2006, Link

Given my computer science background, I don't see many surprises here, but it's still very interesting reading. The amount of power and equipment needed to do this is always surprising, though - just as a matter of magnitude.

Hawking, David. "How Things Work: Web Search Engines: Part 2." Computer August 2006, Link

The mathematics here make my head spin and make me glad that I'm not a programmer. That said, it seems unfortunate to me that this is the end of this series on search engines - assuming, of course, that it is.

Henzinger, Monika R., Rajeev Motwani, and Craig Silverstein. "Challenges in Web Search Engines." ACM SIGIR Forum Vol 36 No 2, Fall 2002,
Link

This article is strictly about under-researched search engine problems: spam, content quality, quality evaluation, web conventions (i.e. standard practices), duplicate hosts, and vaguely-structured data. Essentially, what I get out of this article is that the web is still rather chaotic, so search engines aren't easy.