Searching on the Internet

Nearly all search engines on the internet are susceptible of providing false and misleading information. However, as I searched through other search engines other than Google and Wikipedia, I couldn’t help questioning the reliability of the source. It’s strange as I have come to trust and rely on Google for everything else and I felt like I was in an unknown country. I actually ended up cross-checking my answers in the scavenger hunt below with other sources from Google because I felt the ranking of the information on ‘AltaVista’ a little peculiar.

The search engines rank the information found on the internet by relevance to the words and concept in the query. It can also be distinguished through its overall link popularity and its advertisers and sponsor are also given higher priority in the rank. This is why the first page is usually more useful than the rest. As a potentially large number of pages can be retrieved by a search, good relevancy ranking is important. Most search engines use various criteria to construct a relevancy rating of each hit and will present your search results in this order. For example, the ranking will be based on; the presence of the search terms in the title, URL, first heading, number of times the search term appears in the document, search terms appearing early in the document, etc.

Although we are recommended to explore and use other search engines other than Google, I would have to agree it is my favourite search engine. Google is a top search engine for a reason. The millions of people who use it each day are proof of its greater advantages over other smaller and obscure web sites like ‘AltaVista’. It is the easiest and most efficient way to look up information, therefore stating why it is actually by home page on my personal computer.

I am Pro-Google! :)