Computer science majors use algorithms and software programs to analyze and graph users online social interactions. Josh Probst completed a project called Graphing collegefacebook.com in which he developed software tools to analyze the connections between early users of Facebook.
The structure of online searching provides another fertile area for computer science research projects. Projects look at user search strategies and behavior as well as the structures that ranks and organizes search results. Yasir Alvi completed a project called Searching on the Internet: Exploiting the Underlying Link Structure of the Web which examined how the structure of online linking effects user search experience.
Computer science majors also conduct theoretical research projects that look at the mathematical and algorithmic structure of the online environment. Joshua Lee conducted a project called Visualization of Maximum Flow Algorithms that looked at complex algorithms that can be used to determine online search results rankings and packet disbursement speeds.