1. “The Searching Quagmire” Paid placement: advertising that is outside of the editorial content of the search results Paid inclusion: advertising within the editorial content of the search results Paid submission is the practice of requiring payment to speed up the processing of a listing Spamdexing: manipulation of metatags and text by Webmasters

2. Misconceptions That Lead us Astray The whole Web is crawled All search engines search the same set of Web pages AND should find more results than OR All search engines work the same Search engines search the actual page at the time of searching “Advanced” features (i.e. Boolean queries), are the best way to search and will get you everything that is relevant to your question Directories and search engines are the same thing

3. How do search engines determine ranking? Popularity of the site (indicated by number of links to it) Link analysis (if more pages point to a site, then those pointers represent “selections” by real experts on a topic) Collaborative filtering (the choices others with the same query have made) Exceptions to popularity (new sites have fewer links to them) Boosting ranking by type of site Sources of search engine revenues (pay-for-ranking) Information skewing Metadata and classification schemes Context and personalization

4. What should we do? Know the identity of the metadata source Identify that a source can be trusted Monitor and publicize the behavior of Web information or metadata sources over time

5. Establishing and Maintaining Trust in Online Systems Trust and quality are tightly connected Consumers want information that is accurate, relevant, and timely Data is constantly changing How do you know if content is trustworthy? Look for spelling and grammar errors Look for citations of facts and statistics

6. Continued… Web sites should be easy to navigate Information should download quickly Author should be clearly identified Include an e-mail link to the Webmaster Think about sponsorship .gov, .edu, .com Links should not be out of date Currency is one of the most important factors in information quality

7. Continued … Look at the stated goals and objectives of the website Stability/staying power The style should be consistent with the subject content

8. Discussion Questions How do you judge a website? What is the most important criteria to you? What is the least important? Does your judgment change when the website is academic? Government? Commercial? How much do you trust the information a search engine gives you? Does it matter to you, whether it is skewed or not?