Mod 10 - Search Engines

Question 1

What is a regular graph (social media)?

Answer 1

It uses nodes and edges to connect things together.

ex. Friends on Facebook (mutual)

Question 2

What is a directed graph (social media)?

Answer 2

It uses nodes and edges too, but there are also arrows as there are more complex relationships.
ex. follow someone on Twitter but they don’t follow you back or vice versa

Question 3

How do links work?

Answer 3

Web pages have links to other pages which allows you to “travel” around the web. Hence, worldwide web.

Question 4

What are spiders?

Answer 4

They start at one web page and explore others linked to it so they can gather info about it
(ex. how google gathers info on pages)

Question 5

What is a focused spider?

Answer 5

It is a spider that targets a specific topic, only looking at pages related to that topic, & gathering information.

Question 6

What is a polite spider?

Answer 6

It is very cooperative with other websites and will follow the website instructions.

Question 7

What is spider revisit frequency?

Answer 7

It considers how often pages change to figure out how often spiders visit that page.

Question 8

What is the issue with paywalls for spiders?

Answer 8

A subscription is required to view the content, so how do spiders access it to advertise it? Websites open backdoors for the spiders to enter through.

Question 9

What is the issue with dynamic content & query strings for spiders?

Answer 9

1. This content is varied for the different users viewing it - complex what spiders see.
2. Do spiders care about query strings - additional information about content

Question 10

What do web searches need to worry about including (indexing)?

Answer 10

• list occurrences: where, when & how many times a word appears in a website (makes a list)
• punctuation: email vs. e-mail (detects the same thing)
• accents: Beyonce vs. Beyoncé
• “stop” words: the, it, is (don’t index)
• word variants: sell, sells, selling, etc. (indexed together)

Question 11

What are examples of advanced indexing?

Answer 11

• synonymy: synonyms treated similarly (big & large)

- polysemy: create separate indexes for words spelled the same with different meanings (ex river bank and money bank)

Question 12

What can evil spiders do?

Answer 12

1. They can steal content and claim it as their own

2. They can steal emails to send spam emails

Question 13

How do search engines search for phrases with more than 1 word?

Answer 13

The search engine goes through all the webpages containing each word separately and looks for combinations and returns those pages.

Question 14

How does page ranking work?

Answer 14

Pages that have lots of other pages linking to it are often more authoritative sources & thus, more important so they receive a higher ranking (meaning they show up more in searches). It looks for HTML elements that relate to the search (ex. href, title, h1)

Question 15

How does penalization/rewarding work in page ranking?

Answer 15

Pages will be penalized for having excessive ads or aggregators.
Pages are rewarded for content quality, reputability, and authority sources.

Question 16

How can search be manipulated?

Answer 16

• hidden text
• aggregators
• link farms
• website hijacking
• Google bombs

Question 17

How does hidden text manipulate search?

Answer 17

Text can be added & made hidden (white text on white background) that is irrelevant to the actual content, so it tricks spiders & shows up in search

Question 18

How do aggregators manipulate search?

Answer 18

It takes lots of content from a bunch of different sites and puts it together into one page so the search engine picks up the site even though it is not all that relevant.

Question 19

How do link farms manipulate search?

Answer 19

A bunch of fake web pages are created that all link tot each other so they seem more important/relevant than they really are.

Question 20

How does website hijacking manipulate search?

Answer 20

A website obtains a link from very reputable websites to make yours look more powerful. (ex. putting your website link in the comments of news page, like CNN)

Question 21

How do Google bombs manipulate search?

Answer 21

It links a phrase to a page that is unrelated to the phrase, usually for humorous or controversial reasons (ex. Bush bomb - miserable failure)

Question 22

How can the minus symbol (-) be used to effectively google search?

Answer 22

It eliminates a word from a search so no sites with that word will show up in the results.
(ex. “potato soup - celery” no results with the word celery will show up)

Question 23

How can quotation marks “ “ be used to effectively google search?

Answer 23

Surrounding a phrase in quotation marks means those words will be searched for in that exact order only.

Question 24

What are examples of other search operators that can be used to help refine a search?

Answer 24

• • means search for this AND this (cat + dog)
• @ searches for a word in social media (@twitter)
• $ searches for a price ($400)
• # searches for trending topics (#uwaterloo)
• • is used as a place holder in a search (largest * in the world)
• . . searches for a range ($20. .$50 or 10kg. .30kg)
• OR searches for both words but the search doesn’t necessarily need to have both (marathon OR race)