The web is where society keeps the sum total of human knowledge.  It’s where we learn and play, shop and do business, keep up with old friends and meet new ones. And what has made all this possible is not just the fantastic amount of information out there, it’s a fantastic new technology: search engines.  Efficient and effective ways of searching through immense tracts of text is one of the most striking technical advances of the last decade.  And today search engines do it for us.  They weigh and measure every web page to determine whether it matches our query.  And they do it all for free.  We call on them whenever we want to find something that we need to know.  — Witten, Gori & Numerico, Web Dragons

 
Readings for Discussion

  • Witten, Ian H., Marco Gori & Teresa Numerico. Web Dragons: Inside the Myths of Search Engine Technology. San Francisco, CA: Morgan-Kaufmann, 2007.
    Copies available in the UWO Bookstore.