Search Engines

 

You're probably more than familiar with using Google to search for information in everyday life. What time is that movie we wanted to see? How late is the restaurant open? What is this weird rash on my armpit? 

Even for school, Google may have been useful to you for finding answers to a quiz or articles for a paper. 

Google, Yahoo, and Bing, among others, are search engines, a software system that searches for information on the World Wide Web using keywords and other algorithms, or patterns or rules for organizing data, to pull results. 

Google has a complex system that determines what results you get and in what order they appear. While there may be pages and pages of results, the first few links are prime real estate.

Google's algorithm is designed to analyze how many times your keywords appear, and uses a Page Rank system to order your results. Usually, the most relevant and trustworthy sources are listed first, but the quality of the sites are determined by Google. 

Google's exact algorithm is kept secret. What would happen if a competing search engine could easily get a hold of that information? We do know that Google can't find everything. A majority of the information produced for academic consumption is not freely available online. Instead it's housed behind a pay wall and requires a subscription or affiliation with a university to access the information. 

Search engines and other online resources like Wikipedia can be a great starting point for your research to generate ideas about your topic and find public information about it. 

However, it's important to understand the limitations of search engines and what you can and cannot access through them. 

Adapted from Maria Accardi & Tessa Withorn's Canvas module Access & Use.

Click the "Next" button to continue through the "Accessing and Using Information" Module.