Search and the World Wide Web

Todays Class:

Class was stupendous today! I am really enjoying the practicality of this class.

I think I came up with an idea of what I want to do for my blog. I have a buddy who is an aspiring photographer, just about to graduate from college. He has his own web page, so I thought I might blog about him and his photography, hopefully helping out his web site.

Put another blog on the fire...

My acts of randomness are on display at http://seatownthunder.blogspot.com/. Stay away if you plan on driving later.

The Blogspot

Hello,

I just created my blog -- a fan site really. You guys should all visit it: http://nathanmacdonald.blogspot.com/

Now just so you know, im really not that full of myself. I'm taking advantage of the fact that hopefully, when google picks up on my hot new site, it will be #1 on Google.

For years I have been trying to beat out thte Doctors, musicians, rappers, and baseball players that keep my name on page 18.

With your help anything is possible, so please, link to my site!

P.S. Joking, joking, I really am that full of myself.

Hopeful from Seattle,

Nathan MacDonald

Google Maps Mashups.

Many of you seem to be interested in Google Maps Mashups. This blog is a good place to start investigating them- http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/

Please Google yourself.

You should start appearing in a Google search of your name. Here are a couple random results-

Marouane Fikry- Student page #1, Class page #2
Charlene McCormack- Student page #1
Amit Kaushal- Student page # 7, Blogger profile # 2
Carolynn Moody- Student page #2

Interesting web links.

Hopefully, this post will motivate you to post interesting links to the blog. Here are some interesting links worth exploring-

• Kartoo
  
• Become
• Scirus
  
• Clusty
• MSN Live
• IceRocket
• Kayak

As you may have deduced, they are all interesting search engine products. Which ones did you like? Dislike?

Here is something interesting. When you search Google for search engine, Google.com is not the first result!

-Sandeep

Where did my post go?

If you don't see your post, please consider it an indication that you posted something that was not too suitable. I don't want to see whinefests or rambling descriptions that don't do anything.

These are the sorts of blog posts I would like to see-

• Critical analysis of what you have seen so far.
  
• Provocative links to news stories, interesting web sites.
  
• Reasoned discussion of what we have learnt so far.
  
• Thought-provoking questions.

Yes, I am interested in your opinion, provided it is professional and well-thought out.

Google Technology

Google Technology

Today, Google is the one of the most powerful research engine around the globe. Google has a lot of features that we can use in our research. I have never thought about these features and how helpful they are. By implementing some key terms in the research box, it totally simplifies the research and makes it easier to find.
What we studied so far in class has helped a lot and I will definitely use it in the future; so far I did change the way how I do research in generalJ. Before, I used to just put some key terms and words and look up at the result. Now I do it perfectly especially when you are comparing some thing or looking for some true/false articles. The other features such as groups, images, news and maps are so helpful. It takes the research automatically to the closest concerned data. The data base is just amazing and you can find any thing you want, from businesses phone to VIN numbers for cars and various products around the globe.



Marouane

Google Bomb!

Okay, I had heard the term “google bomb” before, but I always thought it meant to keep doing searches with different terms until you found what you were looking for. In fact, I am positive that I have given at least one person the wrong definition of that term…oops!
I had no idea that people could do that, i.e. the George Bush miserable failure thing. I knew that you could type that in google and his page would come up, but I had no clue as to why. At least I do now! I learned a lot in today’s assignment, Google has so many features that I didn’t know about. I think goggle.com/trends is by far my favorite….coke vs. pepsi, spiderman vs superman, Microsoft vs google…this is too much fun. I have a feeling that I will be spending/wasting a lot of time on this site! It’s especially cool because sometimes it gives events that are pertinent to changes in the trends. i.e. when Christopher Reeves died, Superman had a sudden spike in searches. I typed in tax, and there was a crazy spike in mid April…shocker. Now I can see why google stock has performed the way it has…too bad I didn’t borrow money from someone when it went public. Amit was right, this is gonna be a great class. Have a great weekend everyone!

Drillin' for Google

So what did I learn today?

First off, we all have a lot less privacy than I'd thought. Bummer. I was kind of used to being able to hide out from the autograph hounds every now and then or so.

Secondly, I learned how to search for sites that link to a particular site, a very handy tool for my upcoming career as a moonlighting webmonkey. Nice to know who's saying what about you and where you should address the checks.

"Google bombing." Fear the power of a nerd herd enraged. The Bothell Math Mafia might decide to make you an offer you can't understand.

Google's translation attempts: Still a few bugs in the system. Someone has set us up the bomb.

Cached pages - if you're a public figure, you can't count on simply updating your site to cover your tracks if you suddenly decide to abandon a previously-announced position on whether or not it should be legal to grow hemp.

That's all I got.

Searching and the World Wide Web = My favorite class

Honestly now this class is by far the most interesting and wonderful class I have ever participated in in my entire life. There is nothing similar to this class. I actually learn about a tool that I will use for at least the next 10 years on a daily basis. The power behind the WWW is absolutely amazing. Now I can even stalk people. It is good to know how google ranks their pages as well because if you ever start a company website, or even work for a company that has a website im sure they would all appreciate being ranked higher on google. These valuable skills will follow me for the rest of my life, and I thank Sandeep for helping me discover them. You are my hero! I especially enjoy learning about Zillow and other sites that allow you to discover incredible amounts of information. Never again will I rely on a real estate agent, detective, or other absolutely worthless profession to do something I can do with a simple click of the button. Besides that, not having lecture the entire class is essential in a 4.5 hour class. I have 15 credits this summer and I wouldn't be able to handle all three classes lecturing the entire time. I enjoy using computers and I really enjoy learning more about them. This class has opened my eyes to many things I never knew existed already in the two days we have had. This is quite surprising as I have used computers for the massive majority of my life.

The truth is, this class is going to be a lot of fun while learning a lot of information. Hopefully it will be a low-stress enjoyable class in which everyone takes something important away from. Very few classes like this at UWB and I hope to enjoy every second of it!

Things to learn from Scavenger Hunt.

Here's a list of things I wanted you to learn from the Scavenger Hunt. Hope to see insightful additions to this list. Without further ado-

1- Caching

Did you notice that the list of students from last year was only available through clicking on Google's cache? A cache is an older copy of a file. Even if I delete a page from my server, a copy lives on in the cache.

2- Online does not equal Web.

Did you notice that my post was available on Google Groups? This is a vast collection of information that is online and not on the web. See the Wikipedia page on USENET for more background.

3- Information dies.

It was easier to find information about the latest Fortune 500. But, how about the information from one year earlier? Much harder, right?

4- Information hides.

All of you struggled to find the course evals. Just because information is available online, does not mean it is visible.

5-Things are not available in the format you want.

It was interesting to see how all of you formulated searches. Some searched for seven newspapers in South Dakota and were frustrated not to find any links. If you searched for newspapers in South Dakota, you would have seen the answer.

6- Privacy is limited on the Web.

All of you now know where Bill Gates lives!! Even b.g cannot hide on the web.

Any other insights?

Post frequency

Dear Students,

Please check the blog post expectations in the class syllabus. You are expected to post 500-1000 words/week.

What piece of information is hardest to find online?

Now that all of you are online, I have a question for you. What is hardest to find online? You can take this question many ways. You can think of types of information, types of files (e.g. text vs. video vs. music vs. photo) or anything else. Be creative. Let us create a mindstorm around this idea.

I'm feeling especially topical today

I'm sure it will pass...

Welcome to Search and the Web.