Google

Chris Nolan’s, the Assistant University Librarian of Coates Library at Trinity University, was very informative about Google. He discussed how Google earns its money, how Google produces its results, how Google gathered their information about different sites and he provided a couple of minutes of a ted talk that discussed a filter bubble. Google started in 1998 and just recently had its 16^th birthday. Between 2004 and 2012, Google usage has increased around 40% from 42% to 87%. That means almost everyone uses Google. The company gets most of its money from selling ads to companies; at least 90% of its revenue comes from ads. Most people like Google because of the tailored to you results it produces. The search engines uses keywords, popularity, sponsored searches and many other factors to produce search results that fits your needs. The TED TALK on the “filter bubble” says that this can be a bad thing. It can keep you from seeing everything outside of your own personal internet “bubble”. I find it to be a good thing, but other people believe the opposite. Google also uses page rank algorithms to bring up the links that you most want to see and look at. We also covered the different ways to limit your search results by using things like site:edu or –site:com where one only shows results with .edu in the URL and one excludes all sites that have a URL with .com Chris Nolan also covered what makes a site credible like the author, intended audience, the regency of information and the intended purpose. This was a very informational talk and I learned a little more about Google.