445 WWW Search Engines: Paper Critiques

Before you begin reading your paper and writing your critique, read these two papers:

Michael J. Hanson and Dylan J. McNamee. Efficient Reading of Papers in Science and Technology, 2000.
Alan Jay Smith. The Task of the Referee. IEEE Computer, 23(4):65-71, April 1990.

Here are a list of possible papers for you to critique. For motivation, consider whether the paper you select should be included in a reading list in future search engine classes.

Critique by Saptarshi Kar on When Experts Agree: Using Non-Affiliated Experts to Rank Popular Topics, Bharat and Mihaila, 2001. Wang and Wojciechowski will read and provide feedback.
Critique by YaoShuang Wang on Ranking the Web Frontier, Eiron et al., 2004. Smith and Deak will read and provide feedback.
Critique by Megan Smith on SALSA: The Stochastic Approach for Link-Structure Analysis, Lempel and Moran, 2001. Wojciechowski and Gentsch will read and provide feedback.
Critique by Chris Wojciechowski on Sic Transit Gloria Telae: Towards an Understading of the Web's Decay, Bar-Yossef et al., 2004. Deak and Bhandari will read and provide feedback.
Critique by Kristen Deak on Does "Authority" Mean Quality? Predicting Expert Quality Ratings of Web Documents, Amento et al., 2000. Gentsch and Moukhine will read and provide feedback.
Critique by Stefan Gentsch on Combating web spam with TrustRank. Gyongyi et al., 2004. Moukhine and Prabhakar will read and provide feedback.
Critique by Nick Moukhine on Analysis of anchor text for web search, Eiron and McCurley, 2003. Bhandari and Kar will read and provide feedback.
Critique by Shruti Bhandari on A taxonomy of web search, Broder, 20002. Prabhakar and Wang will read and provide feedback.
Critique by Fabiana Prabhakar on Understanding user goals in web search, Rose and Levinson, 2004. Kar and Smith will read and provide feedback.

Other papers are possible, with permission of the instructor. Only one student per paper. This means that you are free to discuss your paper and/or your critique with your fellow classmates. The process we will follow is:

Mon, Apr 02: Students select papers
Mon, Apr 09: First draft of critique is turned in (ungraded, bring three copies to class for distribution to others)
Wed, Apr 18: Each student reads and provides written feedback on two other draft critiques (bring two copies of each set of feedback)
Mon, Apr 23: Student revises paper based on feedback and turns in final version (one copy, also due electronically)
Wed, Apr 25: Critique is posted here

Suggestions:

Write your critique carefully and professionally. Spelling, punctuation, and other aspects of writing quality counts.
Become an expert so that you can write with confidence. Read related papers, papers that cite this one and that this one cites.
Write for an audience that understands computer science but might not have read the paper you have selected.
First summarize the paper you are reading in your own words to demonstrate that you understand the paper and then consider good and bad points about the paper, both independently and within the context of related work.

Last revised: 25 April 2007.