Dr. Chris Nolan and the talk on how to wisely search for information on the Internet :D

Dr. Chris Nolan came to our class on Thursday and talked about how to search for information on the Internet. The computer I used in the class must have had some problems because it didnot save everything I noted. Despite this unluckiness, the lesson I gained from him is so memorable and practical that I figured out that I am writing this entry without referring back to the note at all.

First thing about the share of the searching market. I was really surprised by the fact that Google accounted for only 66%, far less than what I thought it would. Anyway, it was good to know about other searching websites besides Google, such as AOL, Bing, Baidu (a couple of my Chinese friends use it) and Yahoo. Set aside from these figures, I learned a lot more about how to navigate among a huge source of information coming out from Google. I, as well as my classmates, often look at only several results on the first page so we should be able to make sure that what we are looking for is reliable, academic and relevant to the topic. However, what really happens is that in 99% of the case, the scholar source would not appear until the very end page. To solve this issue, Dr. Nolan strongly advised us to search for scholar source on the top right of the screen before going any further. The other good thing to know is how to search for the definitions by putting the word define and the colon before the word.

Second useful thing is how to determine which source is academic and how to navigate to the academic source much more efficiently. Any academic source should include footnotes and references, which can help you choose other better sources from a magazine or an article. For example, the magazine might be an interview between the journalist and a famous expert in the field, whose works might be useful for you. Utilizing the advances search and typing in the domains like gov and edu are also several methods that Dr. Nolan gave us.

Thank you so much for bringing us so much much much information. I am sure to apply all of them in the research process of every paper I am gonna write.