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As search engines go, Google sets the standard for visual simplicity.
While many of its competitors bombard customers with entertainment
news and stock prices, Google’s homepage features little more than
a colorful logo and expanses of white space. But sophisticated
technology hides beneath the austere design, says assistant professor
of computer science Shivnath Babu, who explains that the $140 billion
company employs artificial intelligence and closely guarded data-mining
algorithms to improve its customers’ searches for “pizza delivery
durham” and “anna karenina cliffs notes.”
Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched Google.com in 1998, after failing
to persuade several companies to buy their search technology. “At
that time, all these companies were trying to become portals,”
Babu says. “Search was only part of the game.” Babu, who came to
Duke in 2005 after earning his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford,
knows of what he speaks. As a graduate student, he was a member
of the same Database Group—now called the Stanford Infolab—where
Page and Brin developed Google’s search algorithms as Frisbee-tossing
doctoral candidates in the late 1990s.
Now Babu is leading a freshman seminar designed to teach the history,
technology, and ethical issues behind Google to computer-science
neophytes. The course is brand-new, and in the spirit of an egalitarian
tech start-up, Babu is developing assignments as the course goes
along; he has assigned each of his eighteen students to teach class
for a day. Their topics range from the emergence of meta-search
engines (which compile the results of searches conducted by numerous
search engines at once) to the economics of Internet advertisements.
During one February class meeting, a student presents a PowerPoint
on the challenge Google poses to museums and other institutions
that store massive amounts of intellectual property. Babu explains
that today’s sophisticated crawlers can unearth information that
the hosts of webpages might not want available in the public domain.
(Also, some crawlers consume so much bandwidth while caching a
webpage that they can crash a site outright.) Ironically, Babu
points out that Page and Brin never published the details of their
work in an academic journal, because they feared that a competitor
might steal their technology. It seems the godfathers of free-flowing
information understood its risks from the get-go.
Professor
Shivnath Babu earned a B.Tech in computer science and
engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 1999,
and received his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University
in 2005. He was awarded a National Science Foundation Early CAREER
Award in January for his work on the Ques project on Querying and
Controlling System. Babu’s current research focuses on managing
database systems, and is supported by grants from Duke and IBM.
Prerequisites
Must be a Duke freshman
Readings
John Battelle, The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote
the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture
Soumen Chakrabarti,
Mining The Web: Analysis of Hypertext and Semi Structured Data
Amy
N. Langville and Carl D. Meyer, Google’s PageRank and Beyond
David
Vise and Mark Malseed, The Google Story
Readings from research publications,
the Internet, and the popular press
Assignments
Quizzes
Leading a class discussion
Class participation
— Jared Mueller '09 |
