Chris Nolan's Presentation

Chris Nolan visited our class last week, and I thoroughly enjoyed his lecture. He talked about the various search engines that are available to us and how they differ from one another. Google is currently the most widely used search engine. I found Nolan's lecture really interesting because he additionally talked about how google is one of a kind because they put a lot of effort into sorting out bad information and sources from the good. They filter a lot of bad sites out of so that the most reliable and relevant sites are listed first when one does a search. I learned about how the various endings in a web address refer to the type of site that it is. For example, if it ends in -edu, then it is a website affiliated with an academic institution (usually higher education) and if the website ends in -org then it is a non-profit organization. Another thing that surprised me was how widely google is used. Approximately 66% of internet users cite google as their search engine of choice. This surprised me because that is a clear majority, for other engines such as Yahoo  (16%) and MSN/Bing (11%) garner much less attention.