Business Driven Technology 6th Edition by Paige Baltzan

Exercise 3

Understanding Search
Pretend that you are a search engine. Choose a topic to query. It can be anything such as your favorite book, movie, band, or sports team. Search your topic on Google, pick three or four pages from the results, and print them out. On each printout, find the individual words from your query (such as "Boston Red Sox" or "The Godfather") and use a highlighter to mark each word with color. Do that for each of the documents that you print out. Now tape those documents on a wall, step back a few feet, and review your documents. If you did not know what the rest of a page said and could only judge by the colored words, which document do you think would be most relevant Is there anything that would make a document look more relevant Is it better to have the words be in a large heading or to occur several times in a smaller font Do you prefer it if the words are at the top or the bottom of the page How often do the words need to appear Come up with two or three things you would look for to see if a document matched a query well. This exercise mimics search engine processes and should help you understand why a search engine returns certain results over others.