...on the internet...
If
synaptic plasticity is understood as the
property of information channels to alter
the likelihood with which they transmit
information, then the internet search
engines found by http://www.google.com can be called synaptic in the
truest sense.
Internet
search engines usually go
through documents on the internet and
look for intersting catchwords. these are
either explicitly stated by the author of
the document or the search engine itself
applies criteria to decide which word in
a document best reflect the content (i.
e: headlines, words repeated very often).
The user
of the search engine can then
enter words the search engine compares
with the words it recently found in the
internet itself and returns related
documents as "hits" of the
search.
This type
of search usually cannot differentiate
properly between the quality of
the documents found. The user of
the search engine is then confronted with
a very large number of hits that might
all bear some relevance to the topic he
searched, but he has to open all the
documents to assess the quality himself.
Google has
found a criterion for exactly
this: the more links are laid on
a certain document, the higher its
quality should be. A link on a document
is defined by the author of a different
document and clearly reflects that the
latter considers the linked document to
be an interesting one and that he himself
uses it more often than not.
Having
searched the internet, google orders the
found documents according to the number
of links laid on them. That
google also weighs the links does not
matter in this context. In other words:
The more often a document is used by
authors of other documents as a link, the
more likely any user of the search engine
google is to find the information on the
document.
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