DIS 19, Fiat Lux: "Don’t or Just Google It":
What It Really Is and When It's Appropriate

(as well as issues of Identity and Privacy)

Back to Welcome

Back to Teaching / Courses

II. Google Search Engine (www.google.com and “The Evolution of Search”) plus Google’s Chrome Browser

a. “Billions of Times a Day in the Blink of an Eye,” on Google’s Inside Search Blog.

b. Keyword Searching (KS) versus Controlled Vocabulary (CV) defined; pros and cons; CV example at http://www.yahoo.com and other human-powered searching at Mahalo.com

c. Beware of Google’s filter bubbles! Google Chrome web browser on a Chromebook using Google search?

d. Compared to other engines at SearchEngine Watch.com (why did Google pay Firefox $1B?—and, what about Bing or Yahoo or DuckDuckGo, which offers no tracking? Note privacy or incognito modes in Firefox and other browsers)

e. Udemy’s “Building a Search Engine”

f. Advanced Searching Techniques

i. Be specific: use more than one or two words in a search (see Brin and Rank's contrary opinion above)

ii. Use quotations marks to force exact match

iii. Use search term and "site: ****.edu" or .domain name to retrieve only search terms in websites with that domain name

iv. Range of years (e.g., fashion icons 1920...1960) or dollars (e.g., computers $500...$800)

v. Search history feature

vi. “Improve Your Google Searches: Using My 15 Top Tricks, Techniques, and Tips,” UCLA Bruin Woods, Summer 2011

vii. Just for fun, try http://www.nochucknorris.com/

g. Status of speech recognition

i. Majel, Google’s speech recognition system to counter Apple’s Siri; Window’s Cortana; Amazon’s Alexa

ii. Siri vs. Google” (Slate, 2012)

iii. “Top 10 Speech Recognition APIs”

h. Google-bombing (aka Googlewashing) for getting unrelated high rankings of irrelevant pages

i. The Google Browser: Google Chrome at http://www.google.com/chrome and “ten alternative browers” (2017)

j. Google Quick Searches via SMS 46645 (define word, movie or weather zip code, VIN number, Fedex/UPS tracking, current flight numbers, patents, tail numbers)

k. Storage issues and privacy concerns (along with static versus dynamic IP, dial-up, and refreshed DSL); no cookies; note that there is now top level privacy statement, but only recently; for a fictionalized view of possible privacy invasion, read Cory Doctorow's "Scroogled" at http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-09-17-n72.html

l. The Internet Archive: Wayback Machine of 308 billion webpages at https://archive.org/

Potential Presentation 2: What can you find about yourself on the WWW, using a search engine? Explain the results.

Revised: 23 December 2017; created: 30 August 2006