Chapter 3 Summary
I was born in 2003 so during my childhood, I basically grew up with the internet and have watched websites and web browsers turn into what they are today, but also never truly realized how they all work behind closed doors. In my review of Chapter 3 “Searching the Web” it explained something to me that I did not ever know before, and that is that search engines don’t actually scour the entire internet, but they instead use something called “spiders” to scan specific websites and are then able to store information in a database. When you type something completely random into a search engine such as Google or something, all it is doing is searching a database and finding “hits” which are all listed on different factors, mainly whoever pays Google the most money to be in the top 5 search results for a specific keyword.
Another part of the chapter I learned a lot from and did not realize was how web pages and search engines worked, is that they all use things like links between sites to filter importance, keywords, and meta tags. These are all aspects of making a search and the result you get from whatever keyword or phrase that you put in. I have known about advanced searches for a while now, but I don’t really use them ever. These were certainly interesting because I was unaware you were able to completely block out words or phrases from your entire search to make it so specific it only shows you exactly what you are looking for, none of that nonsense.
I have always found the concept of Wikipedia interesting solely because of the fact that literally anybody and everybody can edit ANY of the information on there! Now to me, that is just crazy and untrustworthy but even then, from time to time I still find myself using it. This ties in to the importance of evaluating the entire webpage before using it in any context, especially research aspects. The main things you should be looking out for is who owns the site\who wrote the content and whether or not it is recent (no older than 2-5 years old). Wikipedia in my opinion is really only useful for quick lookups or old fact checks, but in this day an age, AI is the king in my opinion of “quick lookups”.