Week 3

This week was all about how sites like google and yahoo go about sorting their searches for you. It was an eye opening read as I flipped through the webpages. I mostly focussed on google as this is the one I use for everything. I had not really considered what they deemed to be important when you had your search. I have learned how to search much better over the years in order to get the item I want. I teach this skill to my students too.

A recent example for me was looking up a guitar. Instead of typing in 'yamaha' or 'guitar' or 'acoustic-electric guitars' I used the model number to narrow the one I wanted to learn about. I searched 'yamaha cpx 500' and went straight to the info I needed. This is a skill that needs to be taught to our students to help them get though the information overload.

In reading the background on google I have forgotten how much they have taken on with maps, images, blogs, webpages and many other things. So they have a whole legal department and they discuss how things are found, they have FAQ sections, advertising sections and more.

Here is the info for how google does their searches:

Google
-uses crawlers that visit a page, copies the content on the page and then follows the links on that page to the pages linked to it
-processes these pages and makes an index
-uses a ranking algorithm called PageRank, which determines the importance of the page by viewing the other pages linked to it
-uses more than 200 signals to order websites and Google updates these algorithms weekly



It is all very tech wordy for me.....