SIMS 202 Assignment 3

Due September 17, 1998

Please bring hardcopy to class

Reading:   Read Chapters 1-4 and Chapters 13-14 of Rowley.

(1) What would be the consequences on how the web is used now if all hyperlinks were bidirectional (two-way), that is, every link from page A to page B automatically creates a link from page B to page A. In other words, the set of in-links to and out-links from a page are the same. What would be the consequences for:

(a) How pages look.
(b) How pages are created.
(c) How people follow links.
(d) How people use search engines.

(2) Repeat question (1) except assume that it is possible to specify a two-way link but not required. Again address issues (a-d) and also address the following:

(e) How does ownership of pages effect the outcome?

Try out some queries using both views of Cha-Cha at http://cha-cha.berkeley.edu

Decide what makes for an effective web search interface. Then try to think of two sample queries for which you think the list view is more effective and two queries for which you think the outline view is more effective. Explain why the view is more effective in each case, or if one of the views is never more effective than the other, try to explain why it fails.