research question

Posted on November 16, 2011 by david.paradis

How does Google’s algorithm exploit a person’s history of search queries, IP address, cookies, and any other information Google acquires through its algorithms, or any other means it uses such as spiders, when providing you with results for your new search, and how does this affect the quality of someones results?

This entry was posted in Homework, Research Questions. Bookmark the permalink.

One Response to research question

  1. Stephen Francoeur says:
    November 29, 2011 at 11:42 am

    David, I think you have two questions here (that would be one too many). One question seems to want to understand the mechanism that Google uses to personalize search results. The second question asks if the quality of those search results are better because of personalization efforts by Google. Depending on which question you actually pursue, you’ll want to rethink your wording. If you go with the first question, you will want to take a moment to pretend that you are going to write a paper on this topic and that your paper will require you to argue some point. A paper that simply detailed the mechanisms that Google uses to personalize search would not be much of a research paper, as it is simply gathering up existing information and repackaging it in a paper. If instead you decided to argue that one piece of the personalization algorithm (say, cookies) was the most important piece, then you’d have a paper that was actually arguing something and trying to say something new and interesting.

    If you decide instead to focus on the second question, you may want to do some quick background reading first on ways that users judge search results (relevance, timeliness, quantity, speed of results being returned, quality of the items in the results page, etc.). Go into a database like Academic Search Complete and do a search for:

    search engines and (judging or judgments or perceptions or assessment)

    Take a look at how researchers are studying the way that users assess search engines; you may get a better idea about your own question.

Comments are closed.