Chapter 3 

 Chapter 3 was an overview of searching the web. It named the big 3 search engines as Google, Yahoo and Bing. Google has been my go-to for as long as I can remember but I have used Yahoo in the past. Bing I can’t say I’ve used much at all, honestly the few times I can recall using it was accidentally since it’s the default search engine for Edge.

  I learned about how search engines work a little bit last year in CIS 108, as far as spiders and databases are concerned. Natural language queries and parsing are new to me, however. It makes sense for search engines to work from the way people speak normally, especially with most people using smartphones and speech recognition to search out things. Meta tags are a nice feature for people making web pages to make sure they get found in a search. Can’t say I’ve ever put thought into them myself.

 Search Engine Features had a ton of new information for me. I had no clue that there were as many search operators as there are. I’ve never searched for a subject where I specifically needed a .pdf from Albania, but if I ever do, I know how to search for it now. As far as stemming, that just makes sense like natural language queries so as not to limit results from maybe not the greatest of search expressions.

  Logical operators were another topic I have a little knowledge one from CIS 108, although I’ve never used them in my life. I can see the usefulness of them, but they give me flashbacks to truth tables so that frightens me.

  Evaluating websites. This should be mandatory reading for everyone. The amount of misinformation that’s easily spread nowadays is kind of wild to me. Just because a website tells you what you want to hear doesn’t make it factual. I’m sure you can find a web page to justify whatever opinion you have on something no matter how terrible it may be in the year 2024. Maybe a little more media literacy would help, but I doubt it.

  I love going into a deep Wikipedia hole as much as the next guy, but I know it’s not a valid resource for writing papers or things like that. I mostly use it to gather a little information on something that piques my interest, not for a deep dive on a subject.

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