CPS 49S Freshman Seminar
Google: The Computer Science Within and its Impact on Society

Recommended TextBook

• The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture. By John Battelle. September, 2005. Portfolio Trade. Paperback version available. Insightful and comprehensive book on the applications and impact of Web-search technology.

Books for Reference

• The Google Story. By David Vise and Mark Malseed. November, 2005. Delacorte Press. Describes Google's history.
• Mining the Web: Analysis of Hypertext and Semi Structured Data. By Soumen Chakrabarti. August, 2002. Morgan Kaufmann. Good and accessible summary of the past decade of research in Web data analysis.
• Google's PageRank and Beyond: The Science of Search Engine Rankings. By Amy N. Langville and Carl D. Meyer. July, 2006. Princeton University Press. Describes some of the Computer Science principles behind Google.

Research publications

• The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. By Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page. Computer Networks and ISDN Systems. Presents the design and implementation of the first Google prototype.
• The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web. By Lawrence Page, Sergey Brin, Rajeev Motwani, and Terry Winograd. Technical report. Describes Google's PageRank ranking technique.
• Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment. By Jon Kleinberg. ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, 1998. Describes an alternative to Google's PageRank ranking technique.

Surveys

• Internet Penetration and Impact. Published by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, April, 2006. Presents facts and analysis of Internet penetration in the U.S.
• Data Memo on Search Engines. Published by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, October, 2004. Presents facts about the use of search engines by online Americans.
• A Taxonomy of Web Search. By Andrei Broder. Published in the ACM SIGIR Forum, Volume 36, 2002. An analysis of log data from the Altavista search engine.

Sample articles from the popular press

• How good is Google? Published in The Economist, October, 2003. Discusses how Google has become a cultural phenomenon and where it is headed.
• Seeking Better Web Searches. Published in the Scientific American, February 2005. Discusses new trends in Web search technology, e.g., personalization.
• University Presses Question Google's Library Digitization Effort. Published in the MIT Technology Review, November, 2005. Discusses Google's plan to scan the text of millions of library books and make the material searchable online.