"Google it"

Over the past week, I have been working my way through the course readings on "metadata" and "search engines." I found myself reading, and re-reading the documents in order to make some sense of the topic. Well, my brain felt overloaded with information, and at the beginning, I could not put all the pieces of the puzzle together. However, now that I have looked at the different types of search engines and seen the varying results they deliver, I feel that I am starting to understand how the various internet search engines work and the significance of these differences.

One eye-opening experience for me was to learn that Google is but one type of search engine out there to assist in navigation of the world wide web. I have Google as the homepage on my computer, so for me, every internet experience is influenced by Google. I feel moronic stating this, but I did not actually know that there was another way to access information on the web other than through the "portal" of Google. Now, I see Google as the "tool" that it is, a highly sophisticated and complex tool, but a tool nonetheless.

In order to really understand how Google worked, I watched a video on youtube called "How does google search work?" and I found it to be very informative. Like many other search engines, Google sends out "spiders" to "crawl" the web, and then using a complicated set of algorithms, it creates a index of the results. PageRank is a tool that Google uses to determine the relevancy of websites (or usefulness to the user) and then places those websites higher on the index. Relevancy is determined by many factors, one such factor is: a high number of other sites linking to the original website.

Before this lesson, I had never considered the different "brands" of search engines, and the fact that they would each have a different slant on searching and indexing information from the internet. When I tried a test search on Google and Yahoo.ca, I got two completely different lists of results (other than Wikipedia, which was at the top for both of them). I found that Google offered a lot more variety of mediums to access the information (e.g. images, youtube video links, and then reputable websites (in my opinion)). Whereas Yahoo.ca had a series of "Sponsored websites" (i.e. advertisements), followed by a strange melange of websites. But, perhaps, I am a bit biased to Google and its result format because of my extensive and exclusive use of it for so long. Nevertheless, I can see the potential benefit of using multiple search engines when researching information. As a teacher-librarian, I think it is of the utmost importance to teach not only the "how to's" when it comes to searching (or researching) on the web, but also to answer the "why" questions as well.

I have not yet mentioned my findings about the Open Directory. This is partially because I have been fascinated by the information I have learned about search engines, and partially because it feels like a completely different entity. The Open Directory runs upon a completely different philosophy and system. "Net-citizens" review websites and promote their inclusion on the directory. All websites are pre-categorized and accessed via a series of hierarchical lists. On the one hand, when one already knows a little bit about a subject, I can see the use of this system. On the other hand, when one does not know the first thing about the topic they are looking for, it can be a challenging process to locate the right information. However, as a result of the peer-reviewing processes, it seems that the quality and appropriateness of the included websites are high, and thus making these websites more likely to be useful in an educational context. But, like many of my classmates (as I have read on the class discussions pages), I found the Open Directory to be a bit challenging to navigate, and a bit "old-school" on the visual side. I think a majority of this stems from the fact that we are used to a search engine doing the work for us; we have been trained into search complacency.

Overall, I feel that I have learned a lot this week about the internet, search engines, and information retrieval science, and their relevancies regarding information literacy skills. As a teacher-librarian, the better I understand how these processes and systems work, the better I will be able to help and to guide students in their research, and to promote the cultivation of their own information literacy skills.