Thesis (Ph.D)--Stanford University, 1999. / Title from pdf t.p. (viewed Mar. 27, 2002). "March 1999." "Adminitrivia V1/Prg/20000414"--Metadata.

Thesis (MPhil)--Stellenbosch University, 2004. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: A growing body of studies is developing approaches to evaluate human interaction with Web search engines. Measuring the information retrieval effectiveness of World Wide Web search engines is costly because of the human relevance judgements involved. However, both for business enterprises and people it is important to know the most effective Web search engine, since such search engines help their users find a higher number of relevant Web pages with less effort. Furthermore, this information can be used for several practical purposes. This study does not attempt to describe all the currently available search engines, but provides a comparison of some, which are deemed to be among the most useful. It concentrates on search engines and their characteristics only. The goal is to help a new user get the most useful "hits" when using the various tools. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Al hoe meer studies word gedoen om benaderings te ontwikkel vir die evaluasie van menslike interaksie met Web-soekenjins. Om te meet hoe effektief 'n soekenjin inligting op die Wêreldwye Web kan opspoor, is duur vanweë die mens se relevansiebeoordeling wat daarby betrokke is. Dit is egter belangrik dat die bestuurders van sake-ondememings en ander mense sal weet watter die mees doeltreffende soekenjins is, aangesien sulke soekenjins hulle gebruikers help om 'n hoër aantal relevante Webblaaie met minder inspanning te vind. Hierdie inligting kan ook gebruik word om 'n paar praktiese doelwitte te verwesenlik. Daar word nie gepoog om al die soekenjins wat tans beskikbaar is, te beskryf nie, maar sommige van die soekenjins wat as die nuttigste beskou word, word vergelyk. Daar word alleenlik op soekenjins en hulle kenmerke gekonsentreer. Die doel is om die nuwe gebruiker te help om die nuttigste inligting te verkry deur gebruik te maak van verskeie hulpmiddels.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 89-93).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 138-144). Also available in electronic version. Access restricted to campus users.

In today's world, desktop computers have become such an integral part of our lives that it is practically impossible to imagine anything being done without the aid of computers. As the world becomes more and more fast paced and users feel a need to have computers on the go, desktop computers have reduced in size without compromising on performance. The late 90s saw the desktop segment make room for the laptop and the small screen devices (SSD) segment, which demonstrated faster growth rates than the desktop segment. The SSD segment, however, had a growth rate that was nowhere near the combined growth rate of desktop and laptop computers. Portability of SSD was one factor that stood out among many others to account for the unprecedented growth rate of the SSD segment that the computer industry had witnessed. One of the most important, albeit under-represented and neglected, factors of a product is its usability. Usability, or the ease with which a product can be used, can be considered to be one of the most important factors in the success or failure of product. Determining the usability of small screen devices presents a bigger challenge, primarily because of the screen size of the SSD. The process of usability engineering aims to solve some/most of the problems that the SSD has. To make up for the drawbacks of usability engineering, systems engineering was used in this thesis, since both disciplines have considerable overlap in their processes. A growing number of SSD users use the Internet in one form or the other. The Internet has grown rapidly in the last decade, and nearly everyone using the Internet has come across a search engine sometime or other. Although research has been limited to the area of desktop search engines, there has not been enough research done in the area of search engines for small screen devices. This thesis compares two different search engines on small screen devices to find the better between the two. To do so, it takes a close look at the usability engineering approach from a system engineering perspective revealing several deficiencies, which may have hitherto gone unnoticed. It also shows a method to integrate several key Systems Engineering components into the usability engineering approach. / Graduation date: 2006

published_or_final_version / Computer Science and Information Systems / Master / Master of Philosophy

Web crawlers encounter both finite and infinite elements during crawl. Pages and hosts can be infinitely generated using automated scripts and DNS wildcard entries. It is a challenge to rank such resources as an entire web of pages and hosts could be created to manipulate the rank of a target resource. It is crucial to be able to differentiate genuine content from spam in real-time to allocate crawl budgets. In this study, ranking algorithms to rank hosts are designed which use the finite Pay Level Domains(PLD) and IPv4 addresses. Heterogenous graphs derived from the webgraph of IRLbot are used to achieve this. PLD Supporters (PSUPP) which is the number of level-2 PLD supporters for each host on the host-host-PLD graph is the first algorithm that is studied. This is further improved by True PLD Supporters(TSUPP) which uses true egalitarian level-2 PLD supporters on the host-IP-PLD graph and DNS blacklists. It was found that support from content farms and stolen links could be eliminated by finding TSUPP. When TSUPP was applied on the host graph of IRLbot, there was less than 1% spam in the top 100,000 hosts.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 65-70). Also available in electronic version. Access restricted to campus users.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 78-81).