Searching the Internet with Chris Nolan

Chris Nolan came in our class Thursday to discuss searching the internet effectively. Once we discovered that every single person in our class uses Google as a search engine, Chris showed us that we were not abnormal: Google is the most commonly used search engine by the general population by a landslide. Yay! I'm normal. Anyway, we then proceeded to learn how Google worked. Apparently Google gathers and lists results according to how many times the words we put in the search engine appear on the webpage, and how many times other websites link to the website being questioned. The websites with the higher numbers in both categories are then listed as the most relevant to our search. I had no idea that Google was that...general? I guess I always figured that Google was a genius that just knew what the legitimate websites were. Apparently not. Some of the most relevant results are from completely untrustwothy sources! Well that is definitely disappointing. And did anyone know that when you click "I'm Feeling Lucky" on the search engine Google goes to the site for what it thinks is exactly what you're looking for? I had no clue. But, my favorite piece of information was probably pretty obvious to anyone else: what the ".com" and ".gov" and etc meant! I just thought websites picked which one they wanted. I never knew that they meant anything!! Sad...so apparently ".com" means that the site is meant for commercial use, ".gov" means that it is a government site (most of the time it is a federal government site), ".org" means that it is for a non-profit organization, and ".edu" means that it is an educational website. This is mind-boggling to me. I also never knew that we could do an advanced search on Google?! What a thrill. Seriously. Thank the Lord for Chris Nolan. :-)