Class started by discussing Ebay. They recently bought the bill-me-later service. This allows them to charge interest on items when buyers cannot pay the full balance at once. It is extr emely profitable because they make more money on an item of lower value. In this way, as it always is with credit and interest rates, the poorest people pay more for the same item than riceer people do.
Then we watched a video describing the difference between paid and organic search. An example of an organic search is google, where websites do not have to pay to be shown on it, but it can be harder to find websites on it than on a paid search. For a paid search, the website has to pay to be found but it makes it much easier for the website.
Search engines use spider programs to find key phrases in the titles and names of websites so that they will be found on search engines. An interesting example of a problem with this that was discussed in the video was one that IBM had had a while ago. They had key words in the title of their website that should have been found by spiders and put them at the top of search engines on that subject. However, the title was not written inHTML text but instead was an image and so google could not find it. Instead, it could only work off of the title on top of the webpage which was an abbreviation and they ended up coming up a few pages later in the search, where people do not usually look because they find something better first.