Chris Nolan

Chris Nolan gave a really interesting presentation today about how to find high quality information on the web. My favorite search engine is Google, and I wasn't surprised to find out that in a nationwide search, over 60% of the population uses Google (ComScore November 2008 Search Share). I also learned some interesting facts about Google, for example, there are people who work for Google that constantly index and change search results. Google sorts its results by popularity, meaning that if many other websites link to a specific site it has higher popularity. Popularity isn't based on how many times people view the site. Popularity is also based on the type of website that links to a site, for example, if CNN links a site, then it must be good and therefore has higher popularity. Google also sorts its results by how many search words appear in the document, so if all the search words appear in the title of the webpage, it will appear towards the top. One thing I didn't know was that Google doesn't search the word "and", so it is unnecessary to type it into the search bar. But, there are other search engines that will search for the exact phrase, so it would be necessary to include "and" in that particular search. Another interesting thing I learned about was the "cached" link. Google makes a copy of every webpage, so if that webpage's server is down you can click on the "cached" link and view the copy of the webpage. It is also useful because it highlights the search words, so it is easy to find the information you want. One thing Chris Nolan talked about a lot was the importance of finding scholarly sources, or at least finding reliable sources. He pointed out that the more advertisements a webpage has, the more popular and less scholarly the webpage probably is. He also said the sites that end in ".edu" and ".gov" tend to be more scholarly, but you need to watch out for bias, and also a student project or a university newspaper article may end in ".edu" and those aren't necessarily very scholarly. I learned that it is possible to narrow your search to include results that only end in ".gov" or ".edu" by doing a Google Advanced search. Another thing that I thought was really awesome was Google Desktop. It is free to download, and it will index everything on your computer, so you can search your own documents. Chris Nolan's presentation was packed with really great information, and I enjoyed it very much.