Chapter 3
In Module 3 we look at web searching, search engines, and other search methods. We looked into something called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to boost website visibility like Google. this happens because SEO can help sites get better and more looked at searches that will have more people looking at it.
The web is what we use to find information, it's made using HTML and has databases that hold URLs. When we search the web we don't search the actual web what we are searching is a query. It's sort of like when you see a spider crawl away this results in a different engine that will have an updated label.
We talked about how some websites will direct you to a link that when you click on it doesn't work and links to something that gives an error this was called a dead link. Some pages have a lot of small clickable icons that have this & when this occurs on multiple links it's known as link rot and can ruin the page's viewing capability. I take a PhP class on campus and it's helping me understand sorta the reality of how much goes into the dark side of making a website and these classes have a lot in common with each other.
A lot of the search engines listed at the top are usually sponsored searches with ads linked underneath them as a second or even first search. We learned this today as well when Professor Weidner showed that amazon.com has a lot of the number 1 spots on Google since the company has the most money & it lets them advertise a lot more than some of the smaller pages.
I somewhat understand from today's class how some engines collect information using meta tags in the HTML code, this acts like a keyword that lets the programmer have a subjective listing experience making whatever is in the keyword seen a lot more. These are cool since it's an automatic process if done correctly and will improve the speed of the search. It's getting a lot more interesting since the programmer who uses the HTML meta tags has other keywords for locations, to get a better read on what is needed and the distance of what the buyer or seller is looking for. This is all done on Google for the most part since Google is a company first and, a browser second.
I also clicked on the first link and mainly did this since the first link usually looked like it would have the best and most informative information. Sometimes the appearance of the site may look good but it can have errors so make sure when you are looking for information that the site does not look sketchy in any way. Wikipedia is a site I used in the past as a go-to site but once I learned that the information listed can be chanced by anyone I didn't want to trust it as a main source. If I were to use it now I'd have to cross-reference some of the information it has displayed.