Chris Nolan's Visit

Chris Nolan, Assistant University Librarian at Coates Library in Trinity University, came to talk to our class today about search engines and how to get the best and most accurate results when searching the web. Here are a four new things I learned:

1) There are over 200 factors that influence what results come up in Google when you type in keywords. For example, one factor is: the more a page is linked to as a reference, the closer it is to being one of the top results.

2) When Google searches for your keyword/s, it also searches for synonyms.

3) When typing in your keywords, if there is a word or phrase you don't want to appear, you can just put a minus symbol before the word and it will not come up in your results.

4) There is a tab on the side that you can click to help you get closer to the results you are looking to find. It has different categories of media, different time restraints, local and distant results, and other subjects. This helps to limit the number of results that appear when a search is conducted

One thing I was surprised about was that the way Google makes its money is by letting advertisers buy ad space. I had always wondered how Google became so profitable so quickly.

Chris Nolan also showed us ways to get less commercial items by typing in the words, ".org," or, ".gov" into the search engine.