Chris Nolan Presentation!

Chris Nolan's presentation on Thursday was incredibly helpful.  He spoke about good and bad internet sources and how to distinguish between them.  We learned about how search engines, Google in particular, list their search results.  Google does not accept payment in order to move a website up the list of search results, though there is a separate column dedicated to this.  Google sorts its results by how many times each website has been linked to or cited in a separate website.  We were surprised and saddened to find that in some cases, such as the search topic "Martin Luther King," racist, outrageously delusional results appeared near the top (the search topic "Jew" yields very similar results).  This demonstrates that the order of websites in a Google search is not linked to the legitimacy or factuality of the sites.  It's important to remember this, so as not to simply assume the top results are also the most useful.  

Chris Nolan also talked about how to search most effectively for sources.  Something he showed us that surprised me was a chart displaying the difference between results found on Yahoo and Google.  I never knew that Google and Yahoo had such different search results.  I've been a consistent user of Googles for all of my internet-using life, aside from those childhood days of Yahooligans, and and it has never really occurred to me to look outside the bubble of Google.  In the future if I have trouble finding what I'm looking for, I'll definitely broaden my horizons and try a different search engine.