Chapter 3 Summary

        I use search engines very frequently in my daily life, and have for years. Little did I know about them before this reading, as I may as well have made the assumption that they were some manner of magical wormhole connecting the entire web to my computer. I had no idea that search engines are actually just huge databases, constantly being updated by bots about what the web consists of. This blew my mind, as it now makes sense to me why search results show hyperlinks to other websites instead of showing the websites themselves. In the past, I hardly ever used Bing, Yahoo, or DuckDuckGo. I stuck to Google, and generally if I didn’t get the search result I was looking for, I would modify my query. I realize that I had completely overlooked the value of trying different browsers’ algorithms to get a different sampling of the web. From now on, I will be trying a different search engine every day, until I develop a favorite perhaps. 

        I also did not understand before this reading what an important role meta tags played in finding relevant information to my searches. I didn’t know that stemming was the reason all of my queries about Canada also included instances of “Canadian,” but it makes a lot of sense. I sometimes wondered how my search engine knew surprisingly well what I was looking for, and this reading provided a satisfying context for that. I have also been inspired to begin using search operators to narrow down and zoom in, so to speak, on the topics I’m researching. The text’s introduction of logic is appreciable, as I recently became interested in it as a way to make simple computers out of basic electronics at home. Clearly, this reading was valuable.