Announcements and Important Dates

Midterm exam will be graded by TA soon. Midterm review feedback will be given this lecture.

March and April, 2023

W Topic M T W T F Some important dates to note:

11 Big data 27 28 29 30 31 27 & 28 Mar (break) and 7 & 10 Apr (holiday).

12 Analytics 3 4 5 6 7 Combined guest lecture by Danzny (Zoom).

13 Genius bar 10 11 12 13 14 Presentations at the end of each lecture.

14 Web3 17 18 19 20 21 $ Presentation slides due on 28 April.

15 Review 24 25 26 27 28#$ # End of all lectures for this class.

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Lecture 16
Search Engine, 

Google and 

The Impact of
Algorithms

IIMT2601 — Management Information Systems

Dr. WANG Dawei

HKU Business School
The University of Hong Kong

Yayoi Kusama - Artworks displayed at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Australia

 Agenda for Today

1 Bonus Participation Review

2 Search Engine Overview

3 Google and PageRank

4 Impact of Algorithms

The Internet is becoming a lter bubble because of Internet companies.

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 Agenda 1 / 4

Bonus Participation Review

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 Agenda 2 / 4

Search Engine Overview

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Search Before The Internet
Manually ip through physical book pages to locate the contact / location details.

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Brief History of Search Engine
Search engine’s history started in 1990 with Archie, a le-transfer-protocol (FTP) site, which
allow users to identify les easily using a search function.

Then, search engines developed to crawling and indexing websites, eventually creating
algorithms to optimize relevancy of the websites.

1990 1994 1997 1998 1998 1999 1999

Archie Yahoo Ask.com MSN Google Alltheweb Naver (Korea)

2000 2000 2005 2006 2007 2009 2010

Yandex Microsoft
Baidu Qihoo 360 Microsoft Live Youdao Sogou
(Russia) Bing

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Search Engine Mechanism
A modern search engine is a program that searches the web for sites based on your keyword
search terms.

The search engine takes your keyword and returns search engine results pages (SERP), with a
list of sites it deems relevant or connected to your searched keyword.

Step 1: Step 2: Step 3:

Crawl Links and Web Sites Index and Cache Web Pages Apply Ranking Algorithm

Search Engine Results Pages (SERP)

Paid Product Listings

Paid
Paid Search Results

Organic Search Results Free

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Study of Search Queries
Study of 1.4 billion+ search queries yielded the following results:

94 %

Organic search clicks 6 %

Paid search clicks

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Search Marketing
Most of the web tra c is driven by the major commercial
search engines.

Although social networks and other types of tra c can

generate visits to your website, search engines are the
primary method of navigation for most Internet users.

This is true whether your site provides content, services,

products, information, or just about anything else.

We always do a web search to nd something. Search

marketing is important to help divert tra c to your website!

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Search Marketing Measures of Success

Click-through rate (CTR) Conversion rate (CVR)

The ratio of visitors who click on a speci c link The number of conversions divided by the total
to the total no. of visitors who view a page. number of visitors.

An online ad is displayed 1,000 times on a If an e-commerce site receives 200 visitors in a

website. Out of those 1,000 times, the ad is month and has 50 sales, the conversion rate
clicked on 50 times. CTR is 5%. would be 25%.

Outside the rst search results page, your A high conversion rate is indicative of
business is virtually non-existent. You have to successful marketing and web design, but it
get on to the rst search page. ultimately depends on your tra c.

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Goal of Search Marketing
The goal for many sites is to appear in the rst SERP for the most popular keywords related to
their business.

A site's keyword ranking is very important because the higher a site ranks in the SERP, the
more people will see it.

Search marketing is the process of gaining tra c and visibility from search engines through both
paid and unpaid e orts.
Two types of search marketing

Search engine optimisation (SEO) Search engine marketing (SEM)

Earning tra c through organic search clicks Buying tra c through paid search clicks

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of a ecting the visibility of a website
or a web page in a search engine's unpaid results.

Search engine optimization is often referred to as the "natural", "organic", or "earned"

search results because it can be achieved without spending money.

It is used to increase the amount of visitors to a website by obtaining a high-ranking

placement in the SERP.

SEO is generally associated with the design of your web and codes. There are
speci c ways to optimize the webpage such that it is more visible to search engines.

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How to Improve Ranking through SEO?
• Publish relevant content.

• Update your content regularly (e.g. Dawei Wang is no longer a PhD student).

• Metadata: keyword, title, description of the webpages.

• Creating relevant links to other webpages (e.g. link dawei.info to HKU website).

• Ask others to link to your webpage (e.g. ask HKU website to link to dawei.info).

• Always describe your visual and video media using alt tags.

• Mechanism (see slides on page rank)?

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Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
is the marketing of a business
using paid ads on SERP.

These ads are often known as

pay-per-click (or cost-per-
click) ads.

Pay-per-click means that

advertisers pay a fee each time
their ad is clicked.

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How About Paid Rankings?
How does a search engine decide which advertisers appear in the paid space?

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Ad Auction

When someone searches, From the relevant ads, the Algorithm will determine
the system nds all ads system chooses only ads your bid (money), ad
whose keywords match that are eligible, e.g. meet quality, the the context of
that search. ad policy etc. the person's search.
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Ad Rank
Ad Rank is a metric used in the auction to rank ads of varying quality and di erent
bids. It is calculated by multiplying your bid by scores related to your ad’s quality.
Cost-per-click (CPC) = Your bid * Your next competitor’s ad rank / Your ad rank

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 Agenda 3 / 4

Google and PageRank

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Search Engine by Market

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Google and Its Founders
Google was created in 1998 by Larry Page (left) and Sergey Brin (right) when they were Ph.D.
students at Stanford University.

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Google Facts
It was started as a research project at Stanford in 1996.

Google was rst named Googol, which means a large number, the number one
followed by one hundred zeros, indicating the system can provide large quantity of
information to users.

Google came from a spelling mistake of Googol.

The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is because the founders didn’t
know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. 

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The Main Idea Behind Google
Proprietary

Crawl Index Rank Monetize

Create a database Rank the websites

Write Automated Make money from
with website for each keyword
programs that can advertisements
keywords and using a specialised
save websites and search ranking
domain names algorithm

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Google’s PageRank
PageRank was developed by Larry Page to measures how important (or occupy a
central location in the network) a webpage on the world-wide-web is.

• It only ranks pages. It does not rank the website as a whole.

• It is based on inbound links and outbound links (next 2 slides for visualizations):

- Inbound link: links that direct back from other pages

- Outbound link: links that go out to other pages

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 Peripheral

Peripheral

Central

Peripheral

Peripheral

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Centrality and PageRank
The more connected your webpage is to other webpages, the more central you are.
This is determined by both the incoming links and outgoing links.

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The Main Idea Behind Google
Proprietary

Crawl Index Rank Monetize

Create a database Rank the websites

Write Automated Make money from
with website for each keyword
programs that can advertisements
keywords and using a specialised
save websites and search ranking
domain names algorithm

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Higher PageRank for High-Quality Sites
Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to nd pages that
are both important and relevant to the user’s search.

Website with just links Website with links, texts, images.

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Google’s Main Revenue

For advertisers For website owners

Bid on keywords.
Make ad space in your webpage.

Pay Google when people click through the ads.

Advertisers bid on the space, highest bidder
Search engine marketing falls in this bucket. wins; Google and Webpage owners get paid.

Payment scheme: Payment scheme:

Cost-per-click (CPC)
Pay-per-click

Cost-per-mile/thousand (CPM/CPT)
Pay-per-impression
Cost-per-engagement (CPE)

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 Agenda 4 / 4

Impact of Algorithms

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Impact of Algorithm
• The Internet is supposed to be free, open and an e cient marketplace.

• The Internet is supposed to be a place where small (vs. big) players can compete.

• However, ultra powerful (and monopolistic) search engines and social platforms
essentially creates an equivalent of a “real estate” market on the Internet.

• Companies not getting a “prime location” may go bankrupt.

• Increasingly, rms care more about what “Google thinks” and what “Facebook
thinks” rather than what customers need.

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 Polarization by Internet
• What we know about the world is largely
determined by search engines and social
platforms that rely on algorithms.

• Algorithms predict what we like and then

only shows contents we may like.

• What person A sees on the Internet may

be di erent from what person B sees.

• This creates the situation where we get

trapped in our own ideology, creating an
increasingly divided world.

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Filter Bubble
Filter Bubble: “a situation in which an Internet user encounters only information and opinions
that conform to and reinforce their own beliefs, caused by algorithm that personalize an
individual’s online experience.” – UK Safer Internet Centre

35 Source: Ted Talk