Chris Nolan's Presentation

Chris Nolan's presentation about searching the Internet was very interesting. During the presentation I realized that although I was already using some search techniques, there were many more tools available. Quotations, plus and minus symbols, and restrictions will all greatly improve the chances that one will find what they are looking for without having to scroll through page after page of results. I usually don't use quotations in my searches, but after doing a few examples in class I noticed what a big difference they made. I also had no idea that you could limit the type of website in the results either. For me, that particular piece of information will save a lot of time and frustration because it allows you to weed out irrelevant results. Lastly, I almost always use Google when searching the net, not for any particular reason, just out of habit. I was very surprised when the class looked at a chart showing the top 100 sites for both Yahoo! and Google. The chart showed how many sites both search engines pulled up and compared how each engine ranked the relevancy of each site. I was a bit surprised by the difference between the search engines' criteria. Seeing them compared on the chart will probably make me more likely to use both engines in the future.