<p>Want a glimpse into Caltech life? Take a look at a contest some CS students are working on about search engines. If you want to help them, you can click the how to help link.</p>
<p>RankManiac</a> 2010</p>
<p>Personally, [Rankmaniac</a> 2010](<a href=“http://rankmaniac2010.net%5DRankmaniac”>http://rankmaniac2010.net) is my favorite Rankmaniac page…</p>
<p>I find this kind of silly. If they had detailed knowledge given by the professor of Google’s algorithms, this could be interesting. From what I can tell, looks like they’re just expected to google bomb their own group’s site. Even if they could do formal analyses of the algorithms, they should really be doing this in a sandbox.</p>
<p>I can’t tell what they’re supposed to learn from this and hardly feel this is “computer science”–at the least, it seems a helluva lot less rigorous than the homeworks/projects I saw for CS 24,38, 156, etc.</p>
<p>Personally, I rather like
[Rankmaniac</a> 2010: the Game](<a href=“http://rankmaniac2010.com/index.php]Rankmaniac”>http://rankmaniac2010.com/index.php)</p>
<p>Turns out linking to a Rankmaniac page here won’t help at all, because it’s encoded as a “nofollow” link:</p>
<p>“nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index.” --[url=<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow]wikipedia[/url”>nofollow - Wikipedia]wikipedia[/url</a>]</p>
<p>@webhappy: CS144 is…strange. Think the prof just wants to take an innovative approach to teaching, or something like that. (The approach to this search engine stuff isn’t strictly informal–the problem set that has them creating these websites also has a couple more conceptual problems in it–but the class has had a number of problems that seemed just as strange as this.)</p>
<p>Hey, we’re two computer science senior undergrads and an electrical engineering master’s student at Caltech. Ask us questions in this thread and we’ll answer them on our blog at:</p>
<p>[rankmaniac</a> 2010](<a href=“http://2010rankmaniac.blogspot.com%5Drankmaniac”>http://2010rankmaniac.blogspot.com)</p>
<p>Thanks!</p>