The Scoop about Search Engines

I learned so many things from Mr. Nolan’s presentation; I’m so glad he came. The information he shared will truly be helpful in research and everyday use of search engines. He also told us some background facts that I thought were really interesting. He told us that Google has about 60% of the market, but that’s understandable, because Google’s the search engine we are most familiar with. But, besides Google, there is also Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, and Ask. What I found interesting was that Yahoo was the first search engine and that it was made by some graduate students. Also, it started out as mostly a directory. Then, Google became popular because they came up with a method to rank search results according to relevance. Documents appear on the top if the searched words are in important parts of the document, like the title. Relevance also depends on the number of times the searched words appear on the document or page.

I knew that Google made all of its money off of advertising, so I found it surprising when Mr. Nolan pointed out that there are advertising links only separated off to the right side and one or two highlighted at the top, BUT only in those specific areas! I had never noticed that before, and I now realize that that is such a convenience, or else browsing the web would be so annoying.
I learned that Google also keeps track of how many links are directed to a website; if there are a lot, then the page appears on the top of the search, if not, it will appear on later pages with lower relevance. With this in mind, of course Google gives certain weight to a website (for example, if a website is linked from my personal website, it won’t be as important if it was linked from, CNN or a government website). Therefore, academic research is hard to find because scholarly papers and sites are lower in the results because not many people are familiar with the certain academic topics or interested in them, so they don’t have as many links directed to them.

Now, here are little tips that help to narrow a search. “.gov” is mostly posted by federal government agencies. Government information can be a little biased, especially in politics, but mostly it is very reliable. To know if a source is reliable or not, it is a good idea to look for credentials (organization and author information is written on the bottom of the page. What also helps is to see when it was last modified and the list of references to formulate an opinion on the site). “.org” is non profit and not a commercial site; it is usually selling ideas (for example, political parties). “.edu” is usually for universities in America (such as Trinity.edu).

What should you type in for a search? If you only want some specific domains, you can go to advanced search. You can choose the language and which words are excluded and included. Cached saved a page in Google, so it highlights the search words and can be helpful if page is down or changed. One can type “define: term” and Google will define it. You can use Google Scholar for more academic searches. Trinity eText shows what articles the school subscribes to. Google indexes everything on the web, but directories are collections of links people have found and put into categories—it doesn’t have the majority of sites on the web, but they’re specific for a certain group.