Reading Comment for Week 11 Readings (Since I was confused about not having 10 reading scores already)

Obviously I think that Wiki's are an extremely tool and asset to all people but most likely in the workplace. I think a majority of my classmates will agree with me. It seems that it would be a no brainer to have all information and data stored in one particular place without ever needing to be moved. This would cut down on the loss of data and streamline the editing process. I do however see a couple of setbacks to this. For one, anything can be edited by anyone as long as some rules are followed. Therefore, we don't actually know what the source is behind the data we are reading and if it is reliable or not. This is why most of my papers throughout my college career were not allowed to use Wikipedia as a source, as layed out by the professors. Also, there would still need to be collaboration in the workplace so that a particular piece of data is not being edited by two different people at the same time. However, even with the minor drawbacks a Wiki can be a very valuable asset.

Muddiest Point Week 10 For My Last Point of the Semester

We stated in lecture that search engines return data in a ranked order of similarity. Obviously there are algorithms that do this quickly. However, we also stated that this can be changed to return data ranked by anything such as authod, date, etc.... I guess what I'm muddy about is how the user goes about doing this in the search engine such as Google? Is there an option somewhere that lets you determine how articles are ranked and returned???

Homework #6 (WEBSITE)

Here is the link to my personal website for homework #6:

http://www.pitt.edu/~swb5

Muddiest Point, Readings, and Comment (All in 1 Post)

Muddiest Point (Week 9):

I am confused as to what the advantage is of using XML over HTML, or if there is even much of a difference? Specifying all of these separate tags, created via the user, only seem beneficial if we were going to have other machines read our file?? Other than that, it would seem much simpler to write in HTML. I hope this is not completely confusing or off base.


Readings for Week 10:

The speed and effectiveness at which search engines work is absolutely astonishing to me. I never understood how they could return so many web pages in such a short period of time before I read these articles, in particularly the piece about “crawler machines”. Actually, even after reading that it is still almost baffling how it takes but a few seconds for a search engine to scan billions of web pages. Even more so is the fact that they can eliminate duplicate pages so that the return is not polluted with the same data over and over. I wonder with the few search engines there are, and with their stranglehold on the market, have engines reached their plateau? Meaning is it even beneficial for a company or individual to try and compete with the likes of Google and Yahoo? Also, is there any room for advancement?? It seems as if they are as good as they can be, as fast as possible, I’m not sure how or why resources would be invested to improve them. However, There must be something to it with Google releasing the new Google Chrome so I guess time will tell.


For Zhen : Comment for Week 10:

I commented in the Technical Discussion board this week in Susan and Jennifer’s thread. See it here:

https://courseweb.pitt.edu/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_id=_2_1&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2Flauncher%3Ftype%3DCourse%26id%3D_9047_1%26url%3D