Michelle Mule
Quentin Gause
Nicole Pisack
Structure of Information: Final
5/3/14
Searching for Information
The readings for the topic, Searching for Information, all explore one central idea, and that is how and why we search for information. Chapter three of Fundamentals of Information Studies by Lester and Koehler, explores the concept of our need to know the unknown. And even further, the need to reduce our uncertainty about a topic. It is a human instinct to want to know something that we do not know much about, but only recently have we had complete and instant access to all of this information. The new technology that we have access to provides us endless amounts of information and the opportunity to find information in places outside of the classroom. Information seeking is defined as “a process in which the actor’s understanding of his or her tasks or problems, information needs, relevance criteria, and the available information space evolve” (Lester & Koehler, 2007, p. 40). This evolution becomes the absolute need to know what we want, and what kinds of information we need. Obviously, everyone has needs and everything that we do is done because we want to meet those basic needs. Thomas D. Wilson “suggests that information seeking might be described as part of a human stress/coping response, which implies that we look for information to help address situations in which our needs are not being met” (Lester & Koehler, 2007, p. 41). As this may be true, we want to satisfy our needs to decrease our levels of stress, but not everyone’s needs are the same. This leads into the different ways to satisfy our information needs, such as entertainment as information. As human beings, we all differ in the things that interest us or c...
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...is a company that collects information from its users and sells it to advertisers. Gleick writes that, “Google’s business is not search but advertising. More than 96 percent of its $29 billion in revenue last year came directly from advertising, and most of the rest came from advertising-related services. Google makes more from advertising than all the nations newspapers combined”. Google has been successful from this method of just advertising and selling ad space. But the reason why companies flock to them is because of their search engine and their special algorithm called PageRank, “it is a probability distribution, and the calculation is recursive, each page’s rank depending on the ranks of pages”. This development was created by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. This Algorithm has made them billions of dollars and will continue to improve and become more efficient.
With the rise of technology and the staggering availability of information, the digital age has come about in full force, and will only grow from here. Any individual with an internet connection has a vast amount of knowledge at his fingertips. As long as one is online, he is mere clicks away from Wikipedia or Google, which allows him to find what he needs to know. Despite this, Nicholas Carr questions whether Google has a positive impact on the way people take in information. In his article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Carr explores the internet’s impact on the way people read. He argues that the availability of so much information has diminished the ability to concentrate on reading, referencing stories of literary types who no longer have the capacity to sit down and read a book, as well as his own personal experiences with this issue. The internet presents tons of data at once, and it is Carr’s assumption that our brains will slowly become wired to better receive this information.
“Google Inc. is an Internet giant with a record $22.9 billion in advertising revenues in 2009 and the indisputable leader in Internet search,” (Unrealist, 2014). Within the industry of Internet Information Providers, Google, Inc. is ranked number one over Yahoo!, MSN, and Facebook, Inc. The majority of Google’s revenue comes from advertising sales. Google has many competitive advantages over other search engines in its industry.
...second using the search engine, people lose their motivation to read and the attention to think about the answer. (Crovitz 353) In Plato’s Phaedrus, Greek philosopher Socrates claims that people who get information without proper instruction as ignorant since they only conceit of the answer instead of the wisdom to find out and understand the answer. (Carr 341) With such access to information, we do spread information and expand human knowledge in a rapid rate. However, we lose our creativity, intelligence and the spirit of inquiry.
(intro) How many bricks are on the Great Wall of China? Who invented the Frisbee? All of this information is quickly found through the use of a search engine. Overuse of the internet as a source of learning, and the lack of the pursuit of knowledge through classic literature is what caused McCullough to state, “ The value of information, facts, figures, and the like, depends on what we make of it-on judgement. But information, let us be clear, isn’t learning” (2008/2012, p. 334). McCullough presents a strong argument on the critical need to love learning, and his use of logos, ethos, and pathos prove effective in his claim that the increasing use of the internet as a source of information,
technology like Google, which pushes us to do it in easier ways in the present time. Accordingly, tasks like reading books to find information and to gain knowledge, is now seen to be near impossible because of the privilege that high technology is offering. Nicholas also shares a theory that, when we start doing new things, our brain changes and molds into a new shape where we can only portray those actions and tasks. For example, if we only use websites to find information for a project and never actually read, our brain will not be able to jump right back and go back to the roots of reading books and catalogs to obtain all that information. Originally, finding information and gaining knowledge by searching was seen to be amazing and satisfying, but now is seen to be much too easy to be proud of and shows laziness in the way we live now in society. Many signs show that Google is making us
In Praise of Not Knowing is an argumentative piece which argues that today’s easily accessible sources of information is doing an injustice for people today who wants to learn new information. Kreider mentions multiple personal anecdotes, from music, to movie plots, to science articles. All arguing if it is truly effective to simply look up the information rather than going through the journey to find out the information yourself. Questioning whether people today are truly learning that “what we cannot find inflames the imagination.”(Kreider 203).
Knowledge is the key to more information that can really stand you out from the rest. This can cause problems for people who crave the unknown or want more than what is given for self-benefit. Books and the internet can only do so much for us to increase technology or even increase work ethics, but in the bad side knowledge can lead up to using the information for terror or etc. The amount of information in this world is a double-edged knife for having it's good and bad to oneself and society and an example of this happening is in Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein.
more we run to search engines for answers the less we shall learn . Technology has taken the place of many students’ brains which causes them to think they are dumb. This leads to the need of searching for answers online at all
...as not only been reliable when it arises to offering a product of the highest and excellence, nonetheless is also continually developing, adjusting, but more meaningfully revolutionizing the industry. Also, what creates Google’s invention so matchless in assessment to its challengers is the attention that it offers to consumer requirements in order to offer a consistent and difficultly substituted the product rather than concentrating on exploiting its profit with each given chance which may cooperation the quality of its search consequence its product. Having examined the company’s internal and external environment it is obvious that Google earnings care and attentions even to the smallest detail to guarantee that it will be the leading company between many other online search engines and has been able to create loyal customers that are continually growing.
"Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder, 'Why, why, why?' Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand." (Vonnegut).
Google was founded by two University of Stanford graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Their main objective of founding the company was to be able to retrieve specific data from massive amounts of information. The two developed a proprietary technology that would become the ultimate search engine. Initially the pair worked out of their dorm room, then a garage, and once they had quickly outgrown these "facilities" they had moved on to a much larger facility where they reside to this day. It seemed to be a matter of time before they had conquered the continental United States, and had begun to eye the lands across the pond.
Google Inc. is a company that started in 2002 and has gradually grown to become an international technology company. Google’s business is mainly focused around vital areas, like advertising, search, operating platforms and systems and platforms, hardware products and enterprise. The company produces its revenue mainly by distributing online advertising. Google also produces revenues from Motorola through selling products. The company offers its services and products in over 100 languages and in over 50 regions, territories and countries. The company assimilates various features in its search service and gives dedicated search services to aid users modify their search. Google also gives product-listing advertisements, which comprise of product information, like price, merchant information and product image without needing ad text or extra keywords.
Google continues to grow and innovate. Google focuses on the user and all else will follow. Since the beginning, they have focused on providing the best user experience possible, and take great care to ensure that they will ultimately serve their customers(Google.com n.d.). In relation to market development and product development the core values “Its best to do one thing really, really well (Google.com n.d.),” fits in with these strategies. “You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer (Google.com n.d.),” describes Goggle’s innovation to mobile platforms. “The need for information crosses all borders (Google.com n.d.).” Google company has grown and has offices in more then 60 countries, maintaining more then 180 internet domains, and serve more then half of their results to people outside of the United States, and this relates to concentrated growth strategy. “Great just isn’t good enough(Google.com n.d.).” Google continues to strive to reach for better ways of doing things, through innovation and integration, continue to improve things in unexpected ways (Google.com n.d.).
Perhaps it is not too much "information," but an explosion of "noninformation" (Wurman 1989) lacking relevance, quality, and usefulness. What is needed is better judgment of the quality, accuracy, and reliability of what is received(Kinnaman 1994). According to John Seeley Brown, people may perceive overload because the information they receive does not fit into current mental models for understanding the world (Tetzeli 1994). The problem of information overload thus has both technological and human aspects. The solution is also two pronged: both technological--create better technological tools and make better use of them--and human--revise mental models and sharpen the capacity for critical reflection and analysis.
First of all, where does the word “Google” come from? The name "Google" originated from a misspelling of "googol,” which refers to 10100, the number represented by a 1 followed by one hundred zeros. It found its way to the English language, now the verb "Google", was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006, meaning, "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet." Their search engine was originally nicknamed "BackRub" because the system checked back links to estimate a site's importance. /// The start of Google was pretty much like the start of every website. It was a research project to these two Ph.D. Students where they hypothesized that a search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better ranking of results than existing techniques, which ranked results according to the number of times the search term appeared on a page. It was first related to the university’s domain, but then the traffic was so heavy that the university asked them to move their website to a domain outside the university. What made Google this popular was the speed it pulls out information, which is counted in parts of seconds. And also, the size of their data base, according to the instructor of our instructor in MIS class only 60% of data you found on Google are in other web search engines.