The Many Faces of Google

When someone coins the term search engine, the first site that comes to mind is often Google. Google is vastly popular in today's society, being utilized for academic and entertainment searches alike.  Although this is today's popular search engine, there are many other equally efficient search engines and many interesting features within Google itself that the general public fails to realize.  As Chris Nolan, the Assistant Librarian, discussed these vast features and search engines often obscured, I learned that Google has a lot to offer and there are certain techniques that can be utilized to easily find the best suited document for a certain need, along the way learning some amusing facts.

Google is the most widely used search engine to this day, not surprisingly it does a great deal of business to fund its growth. Google is primarily funded by the funds obtained from advertisements and sponsored links.  This search engine organizes results in the order of popularity or the number of links the site can respond back to and the reputation of the site.  For example CNN is ultimately given more weight than a unknown personal website.  In addition Google places searches in order of relevance, word frequency, and word arrangement.   The little "I'm feeling lucky" tab, the one many of us considered as a pestering unimportant hindrance on the search engine site is actually a manipulated advertising tool highlighting the efficiency of Google's organizing system by showing how searches would others be found-through time, difficulty, and luck. 

Google also utilizes indexes to relate keywords to specific websites.  Ironically, this has led to many acts of "vandalism" or means of debasing.  The term "google bombing" was created to describe the use of terms and relating them back to a particular link, setting it as an index.  This  "bombing" was the cause of linking "miserable failure" to particular politicians.  Another fault in the organization of searches, is the fact since popular links are linked to more they appear on the top of the search engine, whereas scholarily links are found more later, as they do not generally appeal to the general audience.  To counteract this problem, Google developed Google Scholar, a search engine offering primarily scholarily articles. 

Another way to obtain credible articles is to look for websites ending with .org, suggesting a non-profit organization, and .edu, suggesting an education institution.  However, these sites may not always be scholarily and may contain biases.  Sites with more advertisements also tend to be less scholarily, as a result most scholarily articles are devoid of advertisements.   Examining advertisements can also be used to determine the bias of the site.

The best bet for finding sufficient articles is to search more than one engine, as different engines gather different information.  Some common search engines include Google, Yahoo, Dogpile, and Ask.  However, directories have also been created to fulfill the needs of those looking for academic articles.  Such directories include the librarian's internet index and infomine.

Chris Nolan's discussion provided a great outlook on the vast majority of articles and documentations technology has enabled us to obtain.  In addition it showed that the growing use of technology has led many documents to be biased and often irrelevant and such articles must be avoided when conducting academic research.