Google

By: Brian Dole

Mission:

“To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”

History

• Google was created in 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while both were students at Stanford University
• In the beginning, it ran under the Stanford University website with the domain name google.stanford.edu
• The Google domain name was registered on September 15th, 1997
• The company was incorporated on September 4th, 1998
• It was originally based in Susan Wojcicki’s garage, a friend of the duo, in Menlo Park California

 

Sergey Brin and Larry Page

 

How It Works

Conventional search engines ranked their results by counting the number of times the searched words appeared on the page. Page and Brin discovered a different system of ranking searches by looking at the relationships between sites. They called it PageRank which worked by determining a website’s relevance on the number of pages and importance of those pages that linked back to the original site.

It is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weight to each separate part in a set of hyperlinked documents, it purpose being to measure or calculate the importance of that part within the set. So then, the calculated most important page would be displayed first in the search results and so on and so forth.

 

Advertising

Google makes nearly all its revenue from its advertising. They display certain advertisements to different people based on information obtained by the company DoubleClick. Using the company’s technology, Google is able to determine users’ interests and then target certain advertisements based on who is viewing them. This created a stir in the online community however because many feel that the company keeping track of what we view online is an invasion on privacy.

Google Analytics allows owners of websites to keep track of how many people use their website by looking at how many people click on a certain link on the site. Google AdWords allows advertisers to place the ads on any Google content site, and are compensated for it through either a cost per click or cost per view agreement. Another Google product in tandem with AdWords is Adsense. Adsense allows website owners to have advertisers ads on their site and therefore earn money every time the ad is clicked. Google is the door to the internet for most, so its not surprising how much money they make from advertising like this.

 

Criticisms of Google

Recently Google has gone under intense scrutiny for violating privacy conditions and laws. Google’s storage of cookies has led it users to question the actions. In 2007, the Google Watch site reported that cookies had a life span of 32 years and had a unique ID code that would allow for the creation of user data logs. People claim that Google is gathering loads of personal data without the knowledge of the user. Below is a video from Consumer Watchdog about Google’s anti-trust and privacy policies.

 

Here is another video about the ‘Dark Side of Google’:

 

 

 

 

 

Online Gambling

by Melanie Alban

 Intro:
Online gambling is a pretty “booming” industry these days.  Not only is it     popular in the United States, but also in countless other up and coming  countries all over the world. Certain gambling sites are so large in other countries that they are even included in their stock markets. Online gambling sites offer a wide range of gambling and betting that meets the many different interests of its users.

Even though the online gambling industry is rapidly growing in numerous countries each day, it is probably one of the most controversial industries.  There are laws within many of these countries that are directed towards online gambling alone.  The United States alone has many restrictions when it comes to online gambling.

What is online gambling?
Online gambling is basically just like regular gambling and betting, however, it is all done over the internet.  It is estimated that the online gambling industry makes anywhere from 20 to 50 billion dollars each year.  The number of online gambling sites continues to quickly increase as it becomes more popular in up and coming countries. The estimated number of sites that are available to users in the online gambling industry estimates to about 30 thousand.

What types of online gambling are there?
There are numerous different types of online gambling. According to this website, here is a list of the typical types of online gambling:

•     online sports betting
•     online casinos
•     online poker
•     online gaming

Of these different types, online sports betting is probably the most popular.

What are the laws for online gambling in the United States?
While it is perfectly legal to gamble online in other countries, there is a long and drawn out history when it comes to the laws on online gambling in the United States.  Wikipedia offers a simplified explanation of the different laws and regulations put on online gambling.  Wikipedia also gives specific examples of online gambling court cases.

Technically speaking, online gambling is illegal in the United States.  The actual gambling website is not allowed to operate within the United States, however, they can get away with hosting their site servers in other countries.  The reason that they have their servers in other countries is because the online gambling is not illegal in all countries.   It is then up to the users of the sites to understand the terms and conditions of the site, as well as knowing if online gambling is illegal in their location.

However, taking this into consideration, the United States Wire Wager Act states that not only can the user of the online gambling site be prosecuted, but also the foreign site itself for allowing the United States users to access their site while in the United States.

The whole legal background of online gambling is really complicated and confusing.  It all depends on the situation or circumstance of how someone or a company gets charged if they are caught.  Each court case concerning online gambling is different and unique due to the complexity and difference in laws and regulations of the different countries of the world.  Also, the internet makes it quite difficult as well since everything that is hosted on the internet is able to be accessed by anyone around the world, even it their specific action, such as online gambling, is illegal in their country.

 

HTML 5

by Erick Convery

HyperText Markup Language (HTML) 5 is the fifth revision of the HTML standard language for constructing any sort of content for use on the World Wide Web.  A person who views a webpage does not see the HTML as it is written.  Instead the viewer sees the results that are interpreted by the HTML code.  HTML 5 makes a number of changes and improvements to the fourth revision of the HTML standard language, HTML 4.

History of HTML

The first instance of a form of hypertext language was proposed by Vannevar Bush in 1945.  This would eventually set the foundation for the invention of HTML.  This, however, did not come for quite some time.  In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web as a way to connect a number of computers over a single network.  This was originally done as part of an international scientific organization called CERN, based out of Geneva, Switzerland.  When he designed the Web, he used HTML as the publishing language.  Berners-Lee’s original version of HTML was extremely simple, but as the years went on more and more changes were made to eventually become the complex language it is today.  Many of these changes had to do with the tag attributes that are needed to construct a web page.  The standards of HTML today are set by an organization called the World Wide Web Consortium or W3C.

HTML Revisions

• HTML
• HTML +
• HTML 2
• HTML 3.2
• HTML 4
• HTML 5

Example of HTML 5 Code

What’s New?

HTML 5 has a number of new concepts.  Many of these concepts deal with the general layout of a page such as <div>, <span>, <footer>, etc.  There is also a much larger focus on the use of audio and video throughout web pages using HTML 5.  However, a number of other changes stem from concepts that are now considered obsolete.  With the increased use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), there is no longer much use for tags dealing with font, style and size, as most of this is done through CSS.

Popularity

In a recent look at the top 100 sites with the most Internet traffic, 34% of those sites were running HTML 5.  Out of this 34%, the sites that used HTML 5 the most consisted of social media sites and search engines.  It is interesting that search engines are the major users of HTML 5 since the main editor of HTML 5 is Ian Hickson from Google.  Since HTML 5 is a relatively new concept, it is not surprising that 20% of sites are still running the older revision, HTML 4.01.  Many, such as Steve Jobs, believe that HTML 5 will continue to grow in popularity.  Steve Jobs even went as far as to say that HTML 5 is going to make such programs as Adobe Flash obsolete through its new form of programming for audio and video.