Using a system of multi-step equations, I examine the association between online rental searches and fundamental apartment real estate market variables namely, vacancy rates, rental rates and real estate asset price returns. I find that consumer real estate searches are significantly associated with the market fundamentals after controlling for known determinants of these variables. In particular, I show that apartment rentals related online searches are endogenously and contemporaneously associated with reduced vacancy rate. However, the association between the searches and rental rates is not significantly detected. The searches are contemporaneously associated with positive return on the appraised values of multifamily assets. There is some evidence that the searches are fundamentally associated with REIT returns in the short run and that REIT investors watch the online search trends to inform their stock pricing decisions.

World Wide Web affects the new areas of business as it occurs in our lives more and more often. The term "site" becomes well-known and important for the employers and the Internet advertisement more popular since the commercial sites’ visitors are potential clients of the enterprises and institutes. It is noticed that Internet projects often fail: despite of the site is fine, functional and has a lot of useful information, the result is useless or it does not corresponds to its purposes. This happens because of the very simple reason: nobody knows about the site! Among thousands of sites which can be found by the search engine the user can overview and evaluate only few of the search results. Sooner or later sites’ owners find out this fact, and they question themselves: “Why not my site is placed in the first search engine result page?” Moreover, the site’s theme completely corresponds to the query, and the quality of content is fine and even better than the one of competitors. The answer exists: the site is not optimized for the search engines. The main purpose of the paper is to analyze, select and apply in practice the effective search engine optimization strategies and methods. The main contribution of the paper is the detail description of information dynamics and its structure, research of the world popular search engine’s Google work principles and also other search engines’ and directories’ functional peculiarities, analysis of the page ranging algorithms. The... [to full text]

This is a report on the development of a free open-source framework. The framework is meant to be used to mainly black-box test and/or scrape information from a geographic service like Google Places, Facebook Places or Foursquare. In reality any service that is based on geographic coordinates can be used with the framewok. Amongst others, the framework offers functionalities like visualisation on-the-fly and logging of different aspects of the service. There are a few similar tools scattered on the world-wide web, but they usually are hard to find and if they are found, they either are not open-source, free or they lack in functionality. Another major drawback is that the available solutions are very generic, and thus limiting their capabilities. The work described here is an attempt for a concise, easy to use, extendible framework solely focused on geographic services. In this report, the technologies used are demonstrated, while at the same time the reasons are given as to why a specific technology was selected in each case. Some documentation is also presented and a few references to the actual code-base in case someone wants to extend Geoexplorer or use it at their organization.

Lärare idag lever och verkar i ett samhälle där utvecklingen inom informationsteknologin går allt snabbare. Allt fler skolor får bredbandsanslutningar som möjliggör att strömma ned filmer och annat material från internet. Men det är inte enbart inom den tekniska utvecklingen som det sker förändringar. Länder ändrar gränser eller faller isär till nya, och i många svenska klassrum hänger det kartor som är förlegade sedan länge. Det finns därför stora möjligheter att inom detta område kombinera informationsteknologi och geografi till en helhet. Istället för kartor med felaktig information i klassrummet finns nu tillgång till nya, uppdaterade kartor via internet. Frågeställningen var hur användningen av informationsteknologi används som stöd i geografiundervisningen på svenska skolor.För att undersöka detta användes en kvantitativ studie i form av en enkätundersökning. Inbjudningar skickades ut till ett antal lärare runt om i Sverige, eleverna tillfrågades senare även via ett internetforum för att öka svarsfrekvensen ytterligare en del. Enkäten bestod av ett antal frågor, en för lärare och en liknande för elever. Det visade sig att både lärare och elever svarade mycket snarlikt på frågorna. Trots att svarsfrekvensen var oacceptabelt låg med sina 22 %, har resultaten ändå en bra validitet då respondenterna är spridda över flera orter. För att öka reliabiliteten hade det varit bäst att kombinera den kvantitativa med en mer kvalitativ undersökning, som till exempel intervjuer. Det resultatet från denna studie visar på är att både lärare och elever har en god kännedom om olika gratis programvaror, där samtliga berör geografiämnet. Bägge grupper tror dessutom i olika grad på en förbättring av både undervisningen och lärandesituationen om mer informationsteknologi användes. Eleverna var i båda fallen mer positivt inställda till detta än lärarna.

Google Inc. struggles arduously on the digital battlefield in China’s Internet search engine market. In China, Baidu.com has been described as China’s Google for years and challenged Google’s expansion. This study provides an overview of the Internet service development in China, an illustration of the search engines’ profitability models, and an evaluation of Guge (Google China) and Baidu’s service designs. Overall, the research shows an attempt to understand the possible advantages and disadvantages when a multinational Internet service company enters China. Two notions emerge. First, standardization and adaptation may need to be nicely balanced for the subsidiary company in order to profit in China’s Internet market. Second, Google’s operation in China, Guge, stands strong on the service design end, especially in the area of “ease of use,” “informativeness,” and “fulfillment/reliability.” However, Guge’s major rival, Baidu, shows its advantage on a wider selection of online services. Therefore, in the long run, which company will win at the finishing line is still too early to tell / Google in China -- Google, Baidu and Guge -- Search engine's revenue model in China. / Department of Telecommunications

The first part of the thesis focuses on Information Foraging Theory which was developed by Peter Pirolli, a cognitive scientist from Intelligent Systems Lab at Palo Alto Research Center, to understand how human search in an information environment (Pirolli 1995). The theory builds upon the optimal foraging theory in behavioral ecology, which assumes that people adapt and optimize their information seeking behavior to maximize the success of accomplishing the task goals by selectively choosing paths based on the expected utility from the information cues. The expected utility in Information Foraging Theory is called Information Scent. The second part is to design and build a new way to visualize search engine results in a graphical way that incorporates the concept of information scent to make search experience more efficient for users. The end result of the project will be an improved visualization of search results, obtained by using Google’s Application programming interface (API), latent semantic analysis, and data visualization methods to present a semantics-based visualization of the search results. The proposed design is developed to increase information scent for relevant results and shorten the foraging path to reach the search goal by presenting users with fewer but more valuable proximal cues, thus making search a more human-centered experience.

This exploratory research investigates the factors that might influence a specific group of users’ mental models of a Web search engine, Google, as measured in the dimension of completeness. A modified mental model completeness scale (MMCS) was developed based on Borgman’s, Dimitroff s, and Saxon’s models, encompassing the perception of (1) the nature of the Web search engine, (2) searching features of the Web search engine, and (3) the interaction between the searcher and the Web search engine. With this scale, a participant’s mental model completeness level was determined by how many components of the first two parts of the scale were described and which level of interaction between the participant and Google was revealed during the searches. The choice of the factors was based on the previous studies on individual differences among information seekers, including user’s search experience, cognitive style, learning style, technical aptitudes, training received, discipline, and gender. Sixteen Ph.D. students whose first language is English participated in the research. Individual semi-structured interviews were conducted to determine the students’ mental model completeness level (MMCL) as well as their search experience, training received, discipline and gender. Direct observation technique was employed to observe students’ actual interactions with Google. Standard tests were administered to determine the students’ cognitive styles, learning styles and technical aptitudes. / Cette recherche préliminaire examine les facteurs qui peuvent influencer les modèles mentaux d’un groupe spécifique d’utilisateurs d’un moteur de recherche sur le Web: Google, mesurés selon l’étendue de leur réussite.Une échelle de cette réussite en suivant un modèle mental a été constituée en adaptant les modèles présentés par Borgman, Dimitroff et Saxon, incluant la perception (1) de la nature du moteur de recherche sur le Web, (2) des caractéristiques de la recherche propres à ce moteur, (3) de l’interaction entre le chercheur et le moteur de recherche. A l’aide de cette échelle, le niveau de réussite par un sujet donné utilisant un modèle mental a été déterminé en fonction du nombre de composantes des deux premières parties de l’échelle décrites et du niveau d’interaction entre le sujet et le moteur Google, tel que révélé par ses recherches. Le choix des facteurs a été fondé sur des études précédentes portant sur les différences individuelles entre les chercheurs d’information, comprenant le degré d’expérience d’une telle recherche par l’utilisateur, son style cognitif, son style d’apprentissage, ses aptitudes techniques, la formation reçue, la discipline et le sexe. Seize étudiants en doctorat ayant l’anglais comme première langue ont participé à cette étude. Des entretiens individuels semi-dirigés ont permis de déterminer le niveau de réussite des étudiants suivant leur modèle mental, ainsi que leur expérience de la recherche, la formation reçue, la discipline et le sexe. Une observation technique directe a été utilisée pour observer l’interaction réelle des étudiants avec Google. Des tests standardisés ont été administrés pour déterminer le style cognitif des étudiants, leur style d’apprentissage et leurs aptitudes techniques. fr

Zugl.: Leipzig, Univ., Diss., 2009

Thesis (M.Comp.)--Unitec New Zealand, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 69-73).

Thesis (M.A.)--Ball State University, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Apr. 16, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 54-63).