Monday, January 15, 2007

Dreyfus I: Hyperlinks and Search Engines

Hyperlinks allow a way to link information. They allow static content to be related. In the beginning of hypertext, the novelty of this linking ability was overused. One just needs to look at web pages from around 1996 to see how bad things were in the beginning.


By now the web has matured, some sites have become recognized sources of information. Instead of links being thrown in a page at a whim, now pages and sites require a lot of planning. Companies spend millions running usability tests on their site to make sure it is well organized.


Also, there still exist some spammers and spoofers, who use keywords to boost their rankings in search engines, but any good search engine will find ways to work around this. While some search engines use bots to scour the web (i.e. Google), some make use of editor-reviewed directories (i.e. Yahoo).

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