Searching the Internet

Search engines have became a very useful tool in not only my life but in any person's life. Because of search engines my life as a college student has became a bit easier when it comes to finding information pertaining to any of my paper topics. The search engine of my choice is Google. I use Google because it is one of the most relevant search engines that has valuable sites with much information.

The other day in class we had a presentation by Chris Nolan, who is the assistant librarian at Trinity University. His topic of discussion was how to search the Internet the right way. I really enjoyed having Mr. Nolan as a presenter because he not only was a great presenter he was very energetic about his topic. I learned many things from Mr. Nolan that I previously was not aware of when using a search engine such as Yahoo, or Google. First, about sixty percent on the United States uses Google as their preferred search engine. Other search engines that are used by U.S. residents are Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, and Ask. Another thing I learned from Mr. Nolan's presentation was that Google provides students and anybody else the option to search for information using Google Scholar, which is relevant in finding academic scholar articles or information about a topic. Another option while using Google is using the Advance Search option which allows you to narrow your search that has information only coming from specific sources that you type in. For example, you can type in .edu and the topic of information you are looking for and only information on your topic will appear but its sources will only be from universities or special educational institutions. With Advanced Search you can also limit your search links by domain as well. Advanced search is just an easier way to help limit your search results. I found the Advanced search option to be amazingly awesome! Also, I never knew what the word cached meant under the link to the links that were provided to me by Google, but I learned that if you were to push the cached button it highlights the words that were used in the search engine bar. That is pretty darn cool if you ask me :) Another interesting thing I learned from Mr. Nolan was another way to narrow my searches by inserting a + or " " in the search bar to get better results when searching for two topics that pertain to each other. This is a search shortcut I was unaware of and am happy I learned it because it will help me in my searches from now on.

I am very happy that I was able to learn about all the amazing options Google search provides me. They will be very useful in my future, I have a paper due this Friday and I need at least four sources so now I know how to properly search the Internet for sources. I can tell you I will be using the Advanced search option and the Google Scholar option to obtain my sources for my paper. Thank You, Mr. Nolan for your wonderful presentation on better ways to search the Internet. :)