The reading was pretty good. I was dreading reading 15 pages for the Badke reading, but it just flew by. That’s the genius of Badke. I learnt about truncation, the significance of asterisks, parentheses, OR, AND, Maybe, NOT, while searching.(maybe not maybe). I also loved how he explained that keywords are flat, and its the efforts by different websites like Carrot2, Quintura (cool name) and the others (they don’t have cool names so they were put in the etc pile, there’s a lesson here, hope they learn it) that help set up an search heirachy of sorts. Sites dedicated to declustering (or was it clustering) searches. The example that he gave on himself was spot on. I feel the tips and numbered insights (6 or 7) will come in very handy when its time to do the research paper. The other two readings couldn’t measure up to Badke in a million years, but to show how magnificent Badke is, i decided to entertain them, in a condescending manner of course. I found the first reading, which was the longer one, to be….just that, long. It did go into details about the different processes the search engine goes through to provide us with searches. However, i felt this information wasn’t really needed unless i was building my own search engine. The second reading, shorty i call it, because its…..well shorter, i found to be a little more engaging, it provided a brief synopsis (is that the right word?) of what search engines are, and it also provided useful and relevant data about current search engines. Who knew Google made 550 improvements to how people search in 2009 alone (now that i think about it, the yellow in the second o in Google wasn’t this yellow in 2009, and according to the movie, Green Lantern, yellow is the color of fear, so Google is somehow coercing our search, through fear. Hello research topic!!!) In conclusion… i don’t really know how to end, i just used up my last joke and no question is coming to mind. Do i just say bye, i am well on my way to 400 words already. Think (name withheld), think. Google is a massive company, who’s latest earnings call shows them earning $2.7billion dollars in the 3rd quarter alone. Sites like Carrot2 and Quintura exist to make the process of searching even better, yet we have never heard of them ( well i havent). Why is this? because we’ve never taken the extra mile to search for an alternative search engine, we just ingest what the media feeds and and are content with that. However there are alternative search engines out there like Mokoseek that give a part of what they earn to different charities. I say we stop being lazy and do an extra search, for an alternative Google (or Yahoo or Bing).
