Lab 5 cont.

Andy Clark's Chapter 6-"Global Warming"
This chapter was a very interesting chapter that had a lot to do with trends and how animals, humans, and computers follow different trends to collaborate systems of efficient life. Clark uses the the idea of "positive feedback" similar to how ants use pheromones to create paths to the closest food source. When the food source runs out, the path to the next closest food source will then have the most pheromones. The same concept applies for how the internet websites such as amazon.com market their products sold. They use a method called "collaborative filtering." This filtering notes what people buy and compare to other people that buy similar things. To me, it is sort of like the website creates a proposed "shopping list" for each shopper. It will give a list of things which other people purchased along with the item you are interested in. This system is interesting but has an obvious flaw. All people are different, and not everyone likes the same things, but it is useful because it is all based on trends.

Another key part of this chapter was the advancement of search engines. In the older days of search engines such as yahoo or infoseek, searches were based on text. These searches were very inaccurate in terms of what we have now. Search engines today have a more powerful way to search. These searches are based on hypertext and links. This strategy is similar to the pheromones of the ants and amazon.com. With this technology mastered every person could potentially have a special "list" of different websites that the computer would have previously planned for your to visit.

All in all, this chapter explains a lot of how searches are done, and how simple and natural searches can be. The technology is in our hands we as humans just have to work hard and think uniquely to come up with the most efficient and powerful search tool that can become an everyday tool in our lives.