If you're looking for 2008 housing trend information, it is here.
Hey there. If you've wandered down here, you're probably wondering what the heck this website is supposed to mean. Well, I'm an undergraduate student of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and you've stumbled into one of my homework assignments for the class Science of the Web! (http://scienceoftheweb.org/, Homework 6, specifically.) The problem statement is simply thus:
In this problem, you are asked to attempt to beat us (Luis and the invincible TAs) by creating a webpage which will, after a period of time (1 month), be ranked higher than the page we will create.
Your webpage should contain, among other content, the phrase "<Your name> is a rankmaniac". Your goal is to get google to rank that webpage as high as possible in the search results to the search query "rankmaniac".
In your writeup (worth 20 points), explain what techniques you tried in boosting the page rank of your page and why these techniques would work theoretically.
The rest of the points are based on the ranking of your page on google under the search query "rankmaniac". If your page shows up on google when we search for "rankmaniac", you will get 10 points automatically. If you beat the ranking of our page, you will get an extra 10 points. After that, additional score is based on 22-2N for the 10 people who have their webpage ranked the highest, where N is their rank (e.g., 20 points for the top poster, 18 for the second place, etc.).
Quite a doozy, eh? Well, admittedly, our professor (Luis Von Ahn) is a hilarious and crazy kind of guy, so we've already had a couple of assignments that do fun things with the internet; this is just another.
If you happened to read all the way down here (thanks for taking your time!), I would humbly request that, if it were not too much trouble for you, to plunk a link to this place somewhere on the internet. After all, Google Pageranking respects the legion! Feel free to e-mail me at zizhuang at andrew dot cmu dot edu if you've any questions about this or any other of our crazy little projects. :)
Yes, I know that Google dislikes linking schemes. However, this isn't really a scheme as we're not really competing for any position in a way that would dilute the Google search results - consider it a friendly exercise in learning more about the internet. Some time in the near future, I might keep a log here to keep track of progress.
Until then, see you later!