CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research

What Makes them Click: Empirical Analysis of Consumer Demand for Search Advertising

We study users' response to sponsored-search advertising using data from Microsoft's Live AdCenter distributed in the "Beyond Search" initiative. We estimate a structural model of utility maximizing users, which quantifies "user experience" based on their "revealed preferences," and predicts user responses to counterfactual ad placements. In the model, each user chooses clicks sequentially to maximize his expected utility under incomplete information about the relevance of ads. We estimate the substitutability of ads in users' utility function, the fixed effects of different ads and positions, user uncertainty about ads' relevance, and user heterogeneity. We find substantial substitutability of ads, which generates large negative externalities: 40% more clicks would occur in a hypothetical world in which each ad faces no competition. As for counterfactual ad placements, our simulations indicate that CTR-optimal matching increases CTR by 10.1% while user-optimal matching increases user welfare by 13.3%. Moreover, targeting ad placement to specific users could raise user welfare by 59%. Here, we find a significant suboptimality (up to 16% of total welfare) in case the search engine tries to implement a sophisticated matching policy using a misspecified model that does not account for externalities. Finally, user welfare could be raised by 14% if they had full information about the relevance of ads to them.

A Survey to Fix the Threshold and Implementation for Detecting Duplicate Web Documents

The drastic development in the information accessible on the World Wide Web has made the employment of automated tools to locate the information resources of interest, and for tracking and analyzing the same a certainty. Web Mining is the branch of data mining that deals with the analysis of World Wide Web. The concepts from various areas such as Data Mining, Internet technology and World Wide Web, and recently, Semantic Web can be said as the origin of web mining. Web mining can be defined as the procedure of determining hidden yet potentially beneficial knowledge from the data accessible in the web. Web mining comprise the sub areas: web content mining, web structure mining, and web usage mining. Web content mining is the process of mining knowledge from the web pages besides other web objects. The process of mining knowledge about the link structure linking web pages and some other web objects is defined as Web structure mining. Web usage mining is defined as the process of mining the usage patterns created by the users accessing the web pages. The search engine technology has led to the development of World Wide. The search engines are the chief gateways for access of information in the web. The ability to locate contents of particular interest amidst a huge heap has turned businesses beneficial and productive. The search engines respond to the queries by employing the process of web crawling that populates an indexed repository of web pages. The programs construct a confined repository of the segment of the web that they visit by navigating the web graph and retrieving pages. There are two main types of crawling, namely, Generic and Focused crawling. Generic crawlers crawls documents and links of diverse topics. Focused crawlers limit the number of pages with the aid of some prior obtained specialized knowledge. The systems that index, mine, and otherwise analyze pages (such as, the search engines) are provided with inputs from the repositories of web pages built by the web crawlers. The drastic development of the Internet and the growing necessity to incorporate heterogeneous data is accompanied by the issue of the existence of near duplicate data. Even if the near duplicate data don’t exhibit bit wise identical nature they are remarkably similar. The duplicate and near duplicate web pages either increase the index storage space or slow down or increase the serving costs which annoy the users, thus causing huge problems for the web search engines. Hence it is inevitable to design algorithms to detect such pages

Benchmarking the Advanced Search Interfaces of Eight Major WWW Search Engines

This research project was designed to benchmark the performance of the advanced search interfaces of eight of the major World Wide Web (WWW) search engines, excluding the meta engines. A review of the literature did not find any previous benchmarking studies of the advanced interfaces based on quantitative data. The research was performed by fifty-two graduate students of library and information studies (LIS) on three campuses of the University of North Carolina (UNC) as a class research project for course LIS 645, Computer-Related Technologies in Library Management. The class was offered by the Department of Library and Information Studies at UNC Greensboro through the North Carolina Research and Education Network (NC-REN). The LIS students selected Altavista, Excite, Go/Infoseek, Google, Hotbot, Lycos, Northernlight, and Yahoo for comparative study

What Drives the Selection of Political Information on Google? Tension Between Ideal Democracy and the Influence of Ranking

The emergence of the Internet has altered how individuals obtain information—this also applies to political information. Search engines have taken over the role of political infor- mation gatekeepers, thus becoming key players in democ- racy. However, surprisingly little is known about the role of search engines in the political information process, that is, whether they represent an opportunity or a threat to democ- racy. Through an online survey experiment, which mimicked a Google web interface, this study examines how Swiss citizens select political information on a political news event from a Google search results page. Although citizens consider textual cues from snippets, they are more likely to select sources of information from the top of a Google results page, regardless of the source. We discuss these findings from a democratic theory perspective