Search engines are a great tool for picking what we want from the mass of information that we call the internet yet we also must have a pretty good idea of what we are looking for. Improperly worded requests will usually result in a mass of things from left handed wrenches to gingerbread lollipops. As Badke states with the wrong technique or terminology you get the wrong results. This goes back to the old computer adage “garbage in, garbage out”. Keywords are what make or break a good an efficient search and something we must be cognizant of when we move around the web. So when we’re looking for those pearls of wisdom or that shocking new article. Let’s make sure we speak the right question to the oracle of the web.
I agree that search engine is a great tool to search for information on the internet, because it maybe more trustworthy than Google and Yahoo. Even though Google and Yahoo are both very popular websites we just have to be careful the way we put in certain information in the search bar such as a phrase, a word with brackets around them, or quotation marks. It really depends on how we are searching for something on the internet and even on our phones as well, even if we type in the wrong word, phrase etc, we will get thousands of different words and results. But as you stated we do have to make sure that we speak the right question to the oracle of the web, because in my opinion if we don’t then we will have wrong results and information on something that is completely different from what we actually want to know about.
While I agree that we need to be careful with the terminology we use when it comes to search engines, I can’t help but think of the old saying “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” because of GIGO. Does using the wrong keyword necessarily mean I’m going to get a garbage result? An example would be the American English and British English.
They’re both English but each language has a different terminology for the same idea. One example? The bathroom (American English) and the loo (British English). Excuse the crudeness, but this was the first thing that I could come up with.
Perhaps this was why the concept of nested searching was introduced: to allow people to use different keywords that refer to the same idea. However, even with nested searching, one has to be careful with the terminology used because there is still room for GIGO to happen, right?
It seems we’re all on the same page (punt intended), and that using search engines enable us to try and navigate through all the metadata the internet has to offer. Yet even search engines are misleading as you mentioned if you don’t take the proper approach in using them. Badke mentions the proper way of searching would be to use controlled vocabularies rather than keywords. These enable the search engine to “get at what the data is actually about, rather than seeking out the words the data uses to describe itself (keywords).” Even though, the use of controlled vocabularies is recommended, Badke includes the tradeoff of having to conform to a system rather than using an individual’s preferred vocabulary for the particular subject. In the end I agree with you both and that the keyword approach is a more reliable one in finding information off the internet.
I do not disagree with the topic poster, but garbage in does not necessarily mean garbage out nowadays. Now that the algorithm for how the search engines work have been “updated” to scale depending on the user’s or searcher’s past history searches that means just like we discussed in class, that not everyone gets the exact same results. This poses as a huge problem for a lot of things, first off is equality, not everyone gets equal or the same types of information when they use the search engines. Another problem would be credibility or reliability, while searching for your topics and you recognize anything that relates to your past searches there is that deeming factor of wondering whether the internet is giving you information depending on your personal tastes as well as what you want to see depending on your past history searches versus the internet giving you information based solely on your inputted keywords and not your past history.