Week 2 questions - Navigating the Web

Part 1 – Navigation

1) Listen to the podcast on Navigation which can be found on the Digital Enterprise Page (Google - the digital enterprise).

a) What are the four (4) main points Michael Rappa makes about search? Please write them on your blog page.

- Google enables us to search through vast amounts of texts.
- We have a long way to go to be able to search through images, audio, video.
- Search was difficult or virtually impossible when dealing with paper documents and other types of storage, when talking about targeted searching.
- Enormous amounts of data being produced on a day to day basis and yearly, this offers both problems and opportunities.

http://digitalenterprise.org/podcasts/navigation.mp3


b) Watch or read the Marissa Mayer interview. Write a paragraph or two, on four points made by Marissa Mayer, that you think were the most interesting or significant for business. There is no right or wrong answers here; I just want your opinion.

Google is now putting advertisements next to the news on there search engine. I think it is interesting that Google was reluctant to do this in the past, due to reasons such as, for certain news topics it is inappropriate to show certain advertising. They are still trying to be able to have relevant advertising targeting certain news topics. For example a news story covering car sales will have advertisements of car companies.

The ability to be able to perform mobile search. Mobile search still offers many challenges, “the interface, you’re working with a much smaller screen, how do you get the attention of the ads as well as the search results, and how do you make this really fast” (Mayer, 2009)? Once mobile search becomes convenient and accessible it will be a major boost to business, in particular retail business.

The argument of can we know to much about people when using the web. This can be from the generational differences when giving out personal information over the web for things like transactions. Also when it comes to communicating over the web with sites like Facebook and Myspace. Google leaves it in the hands of the user, in terms of what information they will hand over to Google and then what will be done with that information.

Voice search is a lot more of a closer reality than that of image recognizing search. I think this will be great for business in that people will be able to say a company name or product of the business, or even display a business logo or image and then Google search will bring up matches to that image/voice search.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/06/marissa-mayer-on-charlie-rose-the-future-of-google/


Part 2 - History of the Internet

2) Watch the Bill Joy video, and it will give you a good background to the Internet and particularly to the emergence of the World Wide Web.

1. The Near Web: This is the Internet that you see when you lean over a screen - like a laptop.
2. The Here Web. This is the Internet that is always with you because you access it through a device you always carry - like a cell phone.
3. The Far Web. This is the Internet you see when you sit back from a big screen - like a television or a kiosk.
4. The Weird Web. This is the Internet you access through your voice and which you listen to - say when you are in your car, or when you talk to an intelligent system on your phone, or when you ask your camera a question. Joy concedes that this Web does not yet fully exist.
5. B2B. This is an Internet which does not possess a consumer interface, where business machines talk to other business machines. It is chatter of corporations amongst themselves when they do not care about their human drones.
6. D2D. This is the Internet of sensors deployed in meshes networks, adjusting urban systems for maximum efficiency. This Web also does not yet exist. Joy says that it will embed machine intelligence in ordinary, daily life.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/pontin/14964/