Chris Nolan Presentation

I really enjoyed the presentation Chris Nolan gave yesterday in class. I didn’t even realize how little I knew about Google and search engines in general! The first thing that I found really interesting was his explanation of why Google is so popular. I had never really thought about it before but it’s actually a really impressive search engine for several reasons. It looks at whether your terms are in the title of a page, how frequently they appear, and how close together they are. But it sounds like the most important thing it does is look for the number of other websites that link to a site, which ensures that it’s really a relevant resource. Google is also able to take into consideration the appropriate weight of each website that links to it, so it’s a really complex system!

It was also very helpful to learn about some other aspects of Google like the many advanced search options, cached websites, and different specific domains like News or Scholar which could be really useful in a research-based setting! Also, I wasn’t really sure what a directory was before this presentation; apparently it’s a human-compiled list of sources that would be good for college-level research. They have a lot less sites than a search engine will find, but I’m sure they would still be very useful because every site has been evaluated and deemed credible.

I’m really glad we had this presentation in class because not only is it fun to learn interesting new information, but the facts Chris Nolan shared will probably be very useful in my time at Trinity!