Summary

The goal of this research is to determine how comprehensive -- the number of relevant facts within the first few results -- the search results returned by search engines is. We do this by grabbing search results for search terms from a number of categories (e.g. receipes, celebrities) and identifying how many relevant facts occur in the return pages. We then construct networks based on the facts, the returned pages and their outlinks and use network metrics to find patterns in the manner in which information is "scattered" for different categories of terms. I worked on the pipeline that retrieved the search results, identified the facts and run the network calculations.