The Internet has become a very important tool in the modern life and a useful channel for people to find information. Although there is a lot of information in the internet, it does not mean that Internet users can always find what they really need and want. The difficulty for Internet users is not that they can¡¦t find out the information but that too much information exists. Therefore, good search tools that can help them find useful information become critical to productivity improvement. The purpose of this research is to investigate how people use different tools on the Internet to find information they are looking for. Three factors were examined: task characteristics, search tools, and user characteristics. Experiments were conducted on tasks designed to show different characteristics. Four task types featured by different uncertainty and equivocality levels and two Internet search tools were used in the experiment. Users were asked to use different tools for solving the assigned tasks to see whether their satisfaction differs under different settings. The results indicate that the effect of task types is not significant. That is, user satisfaction of using search engines is similar under different circumstances. Using the search tool itself is the key factor that affects the level of satisfaction. Therefore, the most important thing for internet user to find useful information is to adopt a proper search tool.

This study investigates the effectiveness of a Web search engine with newly added or improved features in Web search engine architecture. These features can be categorized into three groups: The impact of link quality and usage information on page importance calculation / the use of Turkish stemmer for indexing and query substitution / and, the use of thumbnails for Web search engine result visualization. As Web search engines have become the primary means for finding and accessing information on the Internet, the effectiveness of Web search engines should be evaluated on the idea of how effectively and efficiently they assist users achieve a query, which defines performance criteria rather than the pure precision and recall measures developed among basic information retrieval roles. In this thesis, we propose three distinguishing features to increase the efficiency of a Web search engine: The impact of link quality and usage information on page importance calculation outperforms classical hyperlink graph based methods notably, such as PageRank. The use of the Turkish stemmer for indexing and query substitution has remarkable improvements on Web relevance when used in a mixed framework with normal and stemmed forms. Finally, we have observed that users are able to find the most relevant results by using webpage thumbnails in the queries with decreased precision score values, despite their preferred search engine gazing behavior is much attributed.

Šio darbo tikslas – išanalizuoti pasirinktas rinkmenų paieškos sistemas bei pasirinkta optimaliausia metodika sukurti elektroninių dokumentų paieškos sistemą, kuri leistų sumažinti laiko sanaudas ieškant rinkmenų vietinio tinklo serveryje ir vietiniame tinkle sujungtuose kompiuteriuose. Darbe aprašytos elektroninių dokumentų savybės, paieškos metodikos teoriniai ir praktiniai aspektai. Atlikta pasirinktų rinkmenų paieškos sistemų lyginamoji analizė. Šio tyrimo problema: vidutinio dydžio įmonėje ar įstaigoje sunku greitai surasti ir peržiūrėti dokumentus, naudojamus vietiniame serveryje ar tinklo kompiuteriuose. Išanalizavus elektroninių dokumentų savybes bei jų paieškos technologijas buvo sukurta rinkmenų paieškos programa, pasinaudojant "Microsoft Visual C # 2005 Express Edition" programavimo platforma. Sukurta programa "Paieška", skirta surasti rinkmenas vietinio tinko serveryje ir tinklo kompiuterių bendrai naudojamuose kataloguose. Tai ypač naudinga organizacijose, besinaudojančiose bendrais dokumentų resursais. Darbą sudaro įvadas, elektroninių dokumentų analizė, rinkmenų paieškos sistemų analizė, paieškos technologijų apžvalga, realizuotos paieškos sistemos aprašymas, išvados, literatūros sąrašas ir 2 priedai. Darbo dydis yra 35 puslapiai be priedų, 3 lentelės, 4 paveikslėliai ir 17 literatūros šaltinių. / This work main purpose to analyze the usage of main desktop search systems, choose one optimal system and to create electronic documents search engine, which would reduce the time searching for files on a local network server and LAN computers. There are described document search and managemant teoretical and practical aspects. Develope essential features, accomplished comparable analysis of main document search systems. The following problems ware determined: there are no possibilities to find quickly and modify documents which are shared over Local Area Network in medium organization. After analysis of data search technologies it was decided to create a file search application using „Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Express Edition“ programming platform. Created application „Paieška“ is a tool designed for the purpose of searching for files and folders which are shared over a Local Area Network and servers. It is particularly useful in organizations where a lot of folders are shared on individual systems. The work consists of introduction, the analysis of data managemant usage in the document management system, technologies of document seaching, solution for document search system, findings, references and 2 annexes. The size of work is 35 pages without annexes, 3 tables, 4 pictures and 17 references.

Darbe yra analizuojamas „Google“ paieškos „AdWords“ skelbimų efektyvumas. Dėl didėjančios informacinių technologijų svarbos, dauguma vartotojų ieškosi informacijos apie produktus ir paslaugas bei perka juos internetu. Todėl reklamos kūrėjams tampa ypač aktualus efektyvių paieškos sistemos skelbimų kūrimo klausimas. Darbo tikslas – remiantis moksliniais reklamos efektyvumo vertinimo šaltiniais ir „Google“ paieškos „AdWords“ skelbimų efektyvumo vertinimo rezultatais, pateikti bendrą „AdWords“ skelbimų efektyvumo vertinimo ir skelbimų efektyvumo didinimo modelius. Magistro baigiamąjį darbą sudaro trys pagrindinės dalys. Pirmojoje, teorinėje dalyje, yra analizuojami skirtingų autorių požiūriai į reklamos efektyvumo vertinimą, yra pateikiami „Google“ paieškos „AdWords“ skelbimų vertinimo ypatumai. Analitinėje baigiamojo darbo dalyje yra atliekamas pasirinktų „Google“ paieškos „AdWords“ reklaminių kampanijų skelbimų efektyvumo vertinimas. Trečiojoje dalyje yra pateikiamas „Google“ paieškos „AdWords“ skelbimų efektyvumo vertinimo ir efektyvumo didinimo modeliai bei pateikiamos skelbimų efektyvumo didinimo priemonės. / The paper analyzes the effectiveness of „Google“ search engine „AdWords“ ads. Due to the growing importance of information technology , most users search for information about products and services and buy them online. Therefore the issue of ads effectiveness has become extremely important to every advertiser. The objective of this paper is to present general model of „Google“ search engine „AdWords“ ads effectiveness measurement and opportunities of ads effectiveness improvement, scientific resources of advertising effectiveness assessment and results of case analysis. Master's thesis consists of three main parts. In the first, theoretical part of the work introduces analysis, comparison of different authors approaches to the advertising activities performance by finding out methods and indicators, which assess the effectiveness of the ads. The analytical part is based on case study which analyzes effectiveness of particular „Google“ search engine „AdWords“ campaigns. The third part is intended for the model, which shows how to measure effectiveness of the „Google“ search engine „AdWords“ ads, and oppurtinities of ads effectiveness improvement.

Search engines of today are focusing on efficiently and accurately generating search results.Yet, there is much to be explored in the way people interact with the applications and relate to the content. Individuals are commonly unique, with complex preferences, motives and expectations. Not only is it important to be sensitive to these differences, but to accommodate the extremes. Enhancing a search engine does not only rely on technological development, but to explore potential user experiences in broader perspectives - which not only gratifies the needs for information, but supports a diversity of journeys. The aim of the project is to develop an alternate search engine with different functionality based on new values that reflects contemporary needs. The result, Exposeek, is an experiential prototype supporting exploratory browsing based on principles of distributed infrastructure, transparent computation and serendipitous information. Suggestive queries, legible algorithms and augmented results provide additional insights and present an alternative way to seek and peruse the Web. / Search Engines, Interaction Design

Have you ever searched for something on the web and been overloaded with irrelevant results? Many search engines tend to cast a very wide net and rely on ranking to show you the relevant results first. But, this doesn't always work. Perhaps the occurrence of irrelevant results could be reduced if we could eliminate the unimportant content from each webpage while indexing. Instead of casting a wide net, maybe we can make the net smarter. Here, I investigate the feasibility of using automated document summarization and clustering to do just that. The results indicate that such methods can make search engines more precise, more efficient, and faster, but not without costs. / McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts / Computational Mathematics / MS / Thesis

In all natural languages, ambiguity is a universal phenomenon. When a word has multiple meaning depending on its contexts it is called an ambiguous word. The process of determining the correct meaning of a word (formally named word sense) in a given context is word sense disambiguation(WSD). WSD is one of the most fundamental problems in natural language processing. If properly addressed, it could lead to revolutionary advancement in many other technologies such as text search engine technology, automatic text summarization and classification, automatic lexicon construction, machine translation and automatic learning agent technology. One difficulty that has always confronted WSD researchers is the lack of high quality sense specific information. For example, if the word "power" Immediately preceds the word "plant", it would strongly constrain the meaning of "plant" to be "an industrial facility". If "power" is replaced by the phrase "root of a", then the sense of "plant" is dictated to be "an organism" of the kingdom Planate. It is obvious that manually building a comprehensive sense specific information base for each sense of each word is impractical. Researchers also tried to extract such information from large dictionaries as well as manually sense tagged corpora. Most of the dictionaries used for WSD are not built for this purpose and have a lot of inherited peculiarities. While manual tagging is slow and costly, automatic tagging is not successful in providing a reliable performance. Furthermore, it is often the case that for a randomly chosen word (to be disambiguated), the sense specific context corpora that can be collected from dictionaries are not large enough. Therefore, manually building sense specific information bases or extraction of such information from dictionaries are not effective approaches to obtain sense specific information. A web text, due to its vast quantity and wide diversity, becomes an ideal source for extraction of large quantity of sense specific information. In this thesis, the impacts of Web texts on various aspects of WSD has been investigated. New measures and models are proposed to tame enormous amount of Web texts for the purpose of WSD. They are formally evaluated by experimenting their disambiguation performance on about 70 ambiguous nouns. The results are very encouraging and have helped revealing the great potential of using Web texts for WSD. The results are published in three papers at Australia national and international level (Wang&Hoffmann,2004,2005,2006)[42][43][44].

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to understand millennials search behavior on mobile devices. Research Questions: How do millennials value organic and sponsored search results on mobile devices? What are the Web advertising variables that affect millennials attitudes towards sponsored search ads on mobile devices? Methodology: Data was collected from 103 Swedish millennials through an experiment and survey. Conclusion: The findings of this research supports the variables of entertainment and incentives to have a positive association with millennials attitudes towards mobile search ads while irritation, informativeness and credibility were only partially supported when testing independently with attitudes. An overall negative attitude could be seen toward sponsored links when participants motivated their action to click. Moreover, the results illustrated a higher attitude value towards mobile search ads to reflect an increased click behavior on sponsored search results.

This diploma thesis deals with online marketing at Alensa, s.r.o. (Ltd.) The first part of the thesis examines the basics of online marketing, including its tools. The next part analyses three foreign projects within Alensa, based on an online marketing audit. This thesis analyses all three websites by their traffic and their standing among their competitors. The next part of the thesis is devoted directly to the online marketing tools. These online marketing tools are discussed individually and with comments related to their values. SEO analysis was done from a technical perspective. The effectiveness of the website based on site usability and trustworthiness was also analysed. This dissertation aims to assess the current state of online marketing in Alensa and tries to reach a more general conclusion by analyzing three markets simultaneously. The conclusion of this thesis includes comments on all the results and proposes some recommendations to help the company to succeed in terms of online marketing.

Over theWeb, distributed and heterogeneous sources with structured and related content form rich repositories of information commonly referred to as dataspaces. To provide access to this heterogeneous data, information integration systems have traditionally relied on the availability of a mediated schema, along with mappings between this schema and the schema of the source schemas. On dataspaces, where sources are plentiful, autonomous and extremely volatile, a system based on the existence of a pre-defined mediated schema and mapping information presents several drawbacks. Notably, the cost of keeping the mappings up to date as new sources are found or existing sources change can be prohibitively high. We propose a novel querying architecture that requires neither a mediated schema nor source mappings, which is based mainly on indexing mechanisms and on-the-fly rewriting algorithms. Our indexes are designed for data that is represented as relations, and are able to capture the structure of the sources, their instances and the connections between them. In the absence of a mediated schema, the user formulates structured queries based on what she expects to find. These queries are rewritten using a best-effort approach: the proposed rewriting algorithms compare a user query against the source schemas and produces a set of rewritings based on the matches found. Based on this architecture, two different querying approaches are tested. Experiments show that the indexing and rewriting algorithms are scalable, i.e., able to handle a very large number of structured Web sources; and that support simple, yet expressive queries that exploit the inherent structure of the data.