EVENT DETAILS
Monday / CS Seminar
November 28th / 12:00 PM
Hybrid / Mudd 3514
Title: Delphic Costs and Benefits in Web Search: A utilitarian & historical analysis
Speaker: Andrei Broder, Google
Zoom Link
Live Stream
Abstract:
Web search engines are widely perceived as "free." But search is not effortless: in reality there are many intermingled non-monetary costs (e.g. time costs, cognitive costs, interactivity costs, etc.) and the benefits may be marred by various impairments, such as misunderstanding and misinformation. This characterization of costs and benefits appears to be inherent to the human search for information; most of the costs and impairments can be identified in interactions with any web search engine, interactions with public libraries, and even in interactions with ancient oracles. To emphasize this innate connection, we call these costs and benefits Delphic, in contrast to explicitly financial costs and benefits. Our main thesis is that users' satisfaction with a search engine mostly depends on their experience of Delphic cost and benefits, in other words on their utility. The consumer utility is correlated with classic measures of search engine quality, such as ranking, precision, recall, etc., but is not completely determined by them. To argue our thesis, we catalog the Delphic costs and benefits and show how the development of search engines over the last quarter century was driven to a large extent by the quest of decreasing Delphic costs and increasing Delphic benefits. This is joint work with Preston McAfee.
Biography:
Andrei Broder is a Distinguished Scientist in Google Research. His current interests are centered on the analysis of emergent web-based ecosystems. Before joining Google he was a Fellow and VP for Computational Advertising at Yahoo. Previous positions include VP for Research and Chief Scientist at AltaVista and Distinguished Engineer at IBM. He graduated Summa cum Laude from Technion and obtained his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Computer Science at Stanford under Don Knuth. Broder has authored more than a hundred papers and was awarded over fifty US patents. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of ACM and of IEEE, and a member of the ACM SIGIR Academy. He was awarded the ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award twice: in 2012 for his work on Min-Hashing and in 2020 for his work on the "Power of Two Choices".
TIME Monday November 28, 2022 at 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
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CONTACT Wynante R Charles wynante.charles@northwestern.edu
CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)