Internet Searching With Chris Nolan

In class today, Chris Nolan came by and shared a plethora of information with my Essential Computer Skills Class about search engines and how to take full advantage of them. Though I knew some of this information beforehand, the majority of the information was foreign to me. An example is how big the Google search engine has gotten over the past few years. An internet that was once dominated by the likes of Yahoo and AOL has been overtaken by the Google phenomenon. In fact, 2/3 of internet users prefer Google as a search engine over all the others combined!

We also learned how the search engine actually works. There are many factors that influence the actual search: Whether the words are included in the title of the webpage, The popularity of the sites that appear, The frequency of the word, The number of times other sites are linked to the site you've found, along with many others. I find it very interesting that all these factors are taken into account by just typing in a few keywords and hitting the enter key.

Chris also shed light on tips that can help us sort through the sites and figure out the validity of each. A few of these tips included: Paying attention to the authors of the article or webpage found, Noticing the domain name of the website; For example, websites with the domains "edu" or "gov" tend to hold more validity than the others. Another tip was the fact that normally sights that are valid contain links throughout the page about other research done and other links to help you get a better idea of whats being stated.

Today was a very informative day and I guarantee that most of what he said, if not all of it, will be taken into account in all of my future searches.