I thought it might be fun to put together an SEO Quiz.
How many of the following can you get right?
1. Stanford University’s Page Rank is named after?
a. Ranking Web Pages b. Satchel Page c. Larry Page d. The Palo Alto Gradient Evaluation
e. None of the above
Ans: c. Larry Page – PageRank is named after Larry Page, who is the inventor listed on the original PageRank patent.
2. Which of the following search engine crawling models has not been proposed in either an academic paper or patent for emulating how people might visit web pages?
a. Random Surfer b. Rowdy Surfer c. Cautious Surfer d. Reasonable Surfer e. None of the above
Ans:. b. Rowdy Surfer –
The Random Surfer makes an appearance in the 1998s paper The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web, by Lawrence Page, Sergey Brin, Rajeev Motwani, and Terry Winograd. A Random Surfer might click on any link that it finds on a page at random, with a chance that it might leave the page completely at any time.
The Cautious Surfer comes into attention in the WWW2007 poster, A Cautious Surfer for PageRank (pdf) by Lan Nie, Baoning Wu, and Brian Davidson. It’s described more fully in Incorporating Trust into Web Search (pdf). If a cautious surfer believes that a page it is on is trustworty, it is more likely to follow links from that page. If it feels that the page is untrustworthy, it might leave and go to a random (and more trustworthy) page.
The Reasonable Surfer is described in Google’s patent Ranking documents based on user behavior and/or feature data. My post Google’s Reasonable Surfer: How the Value of a Link May Differ Based upon Link and Document Features and User Data is an attempt to describe how the Reasonable Surfer might operate. A reasonable surfer is more likely to click on some links it finds on a page than others, and the patent describes a set of features about links, the page the links are on, and the pages that the links point to, that might be considered when deciding which page a person might click on next.
I’m not sure what a rowdy surfer would do.
3. Which company wasn’t started by two students who walked away from finishing their degrees.
a. Google b. Yahoo c. Microsoft d. Ask.com e. None of the above
Ans: d. Ask.com
Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who both left Stanford before completing their Ph.D. degrees.
Yahoo’s two founders, Jerry Yang and David Filo, left their doctoral programs at Stanford after faced with success at Yahoo.
Microsoft’s Paul Allen and Bill Gates didn’t leave their degree programs at the same time, but both jumped into business before collecting their diplomas. Bill Gates took a leave of absence from Harvard, and never looked back. Paul Allen left Washington State University after two years to work as a programmer, and soon after talked Bill Gates into starting Micro-soft.
Ask was founded by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen, who are both alumni of UC San Diego.
4. Which of the following is not a Microsoft search ranking algorithm?
a. fRank b. Ranknet c. Trustrank d. Poprank e. None of the above
Ans: c. Trustrank
Both Yahoo and Google have dibs on an algorithm known as Trustrank, or in Google’s case “Trust Rank.” Yahoo’s originates in research between Stanford University and Yahoo, which resulted in the paper Combating Web Spam with TrustRank (pdf), and describes how web spam pages might be identified on the Web. A Google patent, Search result ranking based on trust defines trust ranks for entities (people, companies, etc.) who create labels or annotations for documents found on the web.
There are a few different places where Microsoft describes Ranknet and fRank, but one good place to learn more about them is the paper Beyond PageRank: Machine Learning for Static Ranking (pdf)
Poprank is a way of ranking “objects” found on the Web from Microsoft, and is described in the paper Object Level Ranking: Bringing Order to Web Objects (pdf)
5. Google’s Local Search algorithm probably doesn’t use:
a. Location Prominence b. Location Sensitivity c. Location Awareness d. Location Confidence
e. None of the above
The other choices are from Google patent filings that describe aspects of how Google may be looking at different features related to local search and how businesses at specific locations might rank for queries in Google Local. For definitions for all three, see my Google Local Search Glossary
6. Which of the following pagerank algorithms is from Microsoft?
a. Topic Sensitive Pagerank b. PigeonRank c. Block Level PageRank d. User Sensitive PageRank
e. None of the above
Ans: c. Block Level PageRank
The sources for the others: Topic Sensitive Pagerank (pdf) – Google’s Taher H. Haveliwala, while at Stanford University, PigeonRank – A Google algorithm, from April 1, 2002. User Sensitive PageRank – a Yahoo patent. Block Level Page Rank is written about in the Microsoft paper Block-level Link Analysis. It is similar to PageRank, except instead of operating on a page level, it focuses upon segments of pages, or blocks. A single page can have multiple segments, and each can have their own “pagerank.”
7. Which of the following is not a search bot’s name:
a. Gulliver b. Scooter c. Jimbob d. Slurp e. None of the above
Ans: c. Jimbob
Gulliver – the bot from Northernlight, which once was a public search engine and now develops “Strategic Research Portals.”
Scooter – the name of one of Altavista’s robots
Slurp – the name of Yahoo’s web crawler. Not sure how much more of Slurp we will see now that Microsoft has taken over the search index at Yahoo.
There are a large number of web crawlers, and it’s possible that there may be one out there with the name Jimbob, but I couldn’t find one.
8. Which is not a Real Search Engine Ranking Algorithm?
a. SALSA (Stochastic Approach for Link-Structure Analysis)
b. HITS (Hyperlink-Induced Topic Search)
c. SMART (Simple Multi-Attribute Rating Technique)
d. Hilltop e. None of the above
Ans: c. SMART (Simple Multi-Attribute Rating Technique)
Sources for the following:
SALSA (Stochastic Approach for Link-Structure Analysis)
HITS (Hyperlink-Induced Topic Search)
Hilltop
There really is a SMART (Simple Multi-Attribute Rating Technique) process, but it doesn’t involve search engines.
9. Which is not an early name for one of today’s major search engines
a. Backrub b. Ben and Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web c. Ask Jeeves d. MSN Search
e. None of the above
Ans: . Ben and Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web
OK. Trick question. Backrub became Google, Ask Jeeves removed the “Jeeves,” and MSN search evolved into Windows Live, and now Bing. Yahoo started off as “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web.” Ben and Jerry make unique flavored icecreams.
10. Which of the following is not a well known model (in the information retrieval field) for information seeking:
a. Berry-Picking b. Information Foraging c. Sensemaking d. Orienteering e. None of the above
Ans: e. None of the above
There’s a really nice description of these different models of information seeking in the book Search User Interfaces, in the chapter Models of the Information Seeking Process. The book is available free online.
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