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Description:
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During the last decade , Internet search engines have become a popular and increasingly effective technology both in daily information seeking and in the business world . Nowadays , however , there exists very limited research work in this area . Existing studies have primarily relied upon methods and theories originated from prior research in traditional Information Retrieval Systems .
This dissertation is the first in -depth study of Internet search engines with an expanded view of an Information Retrieval System and its applications . On the one hand , it proposes a new framework of relevance assessment . On the other hand , it addresses the online advertising aspect of Internet search engines . Neither expansion has been adequately addressed in existing research in the domain of Internet search engines .
The dissertation is composed of three independent studies compiled into chapter 2 through chapter 4 , respectively . As the content on Internet continues to grow and new indexing technologies become available , Internet search engines are facing an increasing challenge of ranking search results . The impact of the diversity of search results on the performance of search engines has not been systematically examined . The first study aims to address this research issue by proposing a new framework of relevance assessment base on Information Attributes . With an analytical model , the impacts of both diversity and information seeking method have been identified .
The second study empirically tests the findings of the first study . In addition , the study uses search engine quality as the dependent variable . With controlled experiments and a factorial design , the study confirms some of the findings of the first study . Inconsistent findings and implication have been discussed .
The third study aims to answer the research question of "What is the impact of Search Engine Optimization (SEO ) on the online advertising market" . This study builds an economic model that reveals the impact of SEO on the market price of paid placement and the sustainability condition of SEO firms .
Together , the three studies explore and build theories in several untapped areas of Information Retrieval and the online advertising market . The practical and theoretical implications have been discussed in the concluding chapter . |