Duke University's computer science department wants to boost the general public's interest in their field by showing how it relates to every day life. What better way to do that than to teach first-year students about the inner workings of Google, a technology so pervasive and irresistible it has gone from noun to verb in just a few years.
The class, "Google: The Computer Science Within and its Impact on Society," is an example of how the computer science department wants students to explore the social dimensions of the discipline.
At a class session, Professor Shivnath Babu discussed the mechanics of an Internet search using the original 1998 academic paper on Google -- The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine -- by then-Stanford graduate students Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page. From that paper, a $100 billion empire was born.
Making Searches Count
Professor Shivnath Babu offers these tips for using Google:
Know the Zeitgeist. Google keeps track of every word and phrase searched for. "It can see what search terms are increasing in popularity, what's actually going down in popularity," Babu says. See for yourself at Google's Zeitgeist website.
Speak the language. "We typically only type in key words but there's a whole language behind the search box," Babu says. "You can actually say, ‘Restrict my search to just this domain only,' or the fancy operations of, ‘this query, this term and that term.'" Babu recommends reading Google: The Missing Manual and Google Hacks.
Linking builds ranking. If you want your webpage to show up higher in Google search results, get more webpages, especially popular ones, to link to yours. "Links convey popularity," Babu says. "The Google founders came up with a very neat mathematical model of representing the dynamics of popularity and authority."
Beware of Privacy. Every time you go to Google's website, the company captures your computer's Internet protocol address; if you use Google's personalization feature, it also records your user name. And, unless you turn the option off, it captures the history of what you search for. "Their company policy is to ensure that you cannot have personally identifiable information," Babu says. However, "They could; they do have that data."
Gaming Google. An Internet war is being waged around Google. For example, businesses unleash computer "bots" to click on Google ads of competitors to run up the competitors' advertising bills, which are based click-throughs from the Google ads. "There's this whole world, which is all about spamming, creating links, trying to manipulate Google's algorithm," Babu said. "It's a game." If you think you've found a way to outsmart Google, they've probably already found a way to defend against, Babu says. To learn more about Google and cyber war, Babu recommends Google Hacking.
"What I really want you to get out of this is the main ideas of Google: page rank, anchor text, proximity," Babu told students.
Reviewing a diagram of the computing architecture of Google, Babu explained to the 17 students in class the diagram's elements with labels like Indexer, Barrels, Sorter and Crawler. Google computers scour the entire web, like reading a giant sprawling book, and then create a massive database with entries for every word, Babu said. That database is, he said, "like an index in the back of a book."
Lectures on the technical basics of Google are just the beginning of the course, Babu said. Students have already signed up to lead discussions on the behavior of people searching the web, the founding of Google as a company and Internet advertising.
The class has been popular, expanding from a cap of 15 students to 18 and still leaving students on the wait list. The issues raised in the class attract students with a variety of interests.
Vinny Rey said his reasons for taking a class on Google were simple. "I use it all the time -- just to know how it works," he said.
Michelle McCree said she is most interested in the social issues of anonymity, privacy and public policy the technology raises.
"People don't even realize -- if you type in something like, ‘I want to bomb the U.S. government' -- they could advise the government about who's typing in those kinds of [words]," she said.
Jeff Cowart has a different interest. "I wanted to look at the business end of Google," he said.
"I find it really interesting how the different companies that are being advertised [on Google webpages] pay so much money to Google just to have their product advertised because so many people look at Google every day," he said.
Babu came to Duke last year after receiving his Ph.D. from Stanford where he worked in the computer science database group in which Google founders Brin and Page had been. Babu had never used a computer before he enrolled as an undergraduate at Indian Institute of Technology Madras. This year, he won a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development award for his work on making complex networks of computers easier to manage.
The chair of the Department of Computer Science, Pankaj Agarwal, said the Google class is an example how the department is reaching out to students interested in connecting computer science to technology and its social implications.
"Google is an ideal topic because it uses a wide spectrum of computer science concepts, starting from information retrieval to how you handle a large data," Agarwal said. "They have one of the biggest computational infrastructures, they also have to deal with many problems in algorithms, machine learning and so on."
Other examples of computer science courses tied to technology and society are "Programming: A Genomics Perspective," "Java for Video Games" and a "Computational Modeling" course geared for natural science and economics majors who want to minor in computer science.
"Computer science is -- whether fairly or unfairly -- perceived by many as a computer programming discipline," Agarwal said. "Our goal is to change that image."