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