We use algorithms all the time when we do math more than 152 million blogs An average of 6 000 tweets are posted on Twitter every second Every minute 300 hours of YouTube videos are uploaded Every day 4 75 billion posts are made on Facebook It's hard to picture the vast scale of such numbers All the data on the Web would fill more than 305 billion pieces of paper If you stored all the data on CDs the stack would reach the moon To process all this data people use complex formulas called algorithms ALGORITHMS AND THE WEB An algorithm is a set of step by step instructions for carrying out a task When you follow a recipe or do
your math homework you are using algorithms Surfing the Web sending e mail downloading music algorithms tell your computer how to complete all WHAT'S IN A NAME The word algorithm comes from Al Khwarizmi This Persian mathematician wrote a book about algorithms Al Khwārizmi lived around 800 to 847 CE He was a scholar at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad in what is now Iraq This center of learning attracted thinkers from around the Muslim world Al Khwarizmi is best known for his contributions to algebra and the development of the Arabic numeral system This system is still the most common way to represent numbers these tasks The algorithms that fuel the Web are automated processes They are run by complex computer programs Often we are not even aware that they exist Yet algorithms have the power to shape what we see and do online Consider the algorithms used by the popular social media site Facebook
Facebook users with many friends may want to personalize their news feed FACEBOOK'S NEWS FEED On average Facebook users have more than 300 friends Together these friends generate an average of 1 500 posts a day This is an overwhelming amount of information Few people could keep up with so many updates Users would likely miss many of the most important ones
Facebook's solution is to display IN THE REAL WORLD posts selectively When you log on to the site you don't see everything your friends have posted Instead you see the posts that Facebook thinks you want to see How does Facebook decide what MAKING IT PERSONAL Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg explained the idea behind personalization She said People don't want something targeted to the whole world they want something that reflects what they want to see and know Internet activist Eli Pariser however argues that companies use personalization to bring more visitors to their sites and to get more money from ads This has triggered a personal information gold rush Pariser says There's also a whole behavior market opening up in which every action you take online every mouse click every form entry can be sold as a commodity to show you The company's algorithms track your patterns of behavior This includes your clicks shares and likes This data is used to make predictions about
