Chapter 3

I fall into the category of “most people” when the book refers to how most people know how to Google something but do not understand advanced search features.

A lot of the terms describing how search engine’s function were amusing to me. “Web robot” and “spider” reminded me of Skynet or the Matrix. “Dead link” and “link rot” were also funny to me with how over dramatic they sound. The terms abruptly got less humorous once “sponsored links” and banner ad” appeared. I always just skip the sponsored links when I Google something, although I’ve noticed sometimes the sponsored link and the top result is the same URL. It reminds me of when a big budget movie like Star Wars spends tons of money on ads when they probably don’t need to.

The concept of natural language query and parsing seem wild to me. How natural language query analyzes the question and uses knowledge about grammar to spit out a search query sounds incredibly advanced. I previously thought it was something simple like searching for the exact keywords you typed in. I’d be interested in learning how this has changed and evolved over the years. At first, I had a cynical view on meta tags. My first question was why don’t all websites that sell products put terms like “lowest price, best quality, etc.” as a meta tag, but I’m sure the Skynet spiders have ways around that. The stemming process is more so how I imagined search engines operated. The example the book used of “Canada travel guide” stemming into “Canadians guiding travelers” is more rigid than meta links and web robots.

The Google search operators sound incredibly useful, and I wish I knew about them before. I used to type a question and add “reddit” at the end of the search just to get an answer that sounded like it came from a human. I’ve searched using an image before, but I used to use third-party websites to do it. I didn’t know you could use Google itself to image search. I was also unaware of logical operators, and I’ll be using them going forward.

I’d be lying if I said I was thorough with evaluating the quality of a webpage. I don’t use Wikipedia often, but I loosely knew that each article varies in terms of quality and accuracy. I think the book put it best when it said Wikipedia can be useful for doing preliminary background reading, but not a sole source of information on a topic.