A world of information

“The important thing is to not stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.” ~ Albert Einstein

 

It’s amusing to retrace the steps of my research habits. Though some parts are fuzzy, there are still distinct tools that have been used since I was a kid. The first, and probably the most lasting, is the question. When you want to know something, you ask. Then there was the card catalog at the library, the index of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and then gradually the card catalog had moved to a computer system by the time I reached high school, though the old system remained in the library – probably as a reassurance to confused students that they were in the right place. College was a whole new system of databases and online journals, but one could still find information from the indexes of various books, you just had to know how to find them. Then there was a shift to AOL and Yahoo! (I still remember the original commercials for Yahoo!), but my Internet usage was pretty minimal at that point. Then there was the day I was introduced to Google. It was my junior year of college and I was taking a multimedia class (it would be the first time that I actually started dissecting web pages) and there was the Google page, in all its simple glory. It was a like a drug, one that would never be kicked.

 

It is not until reading Halavais work on search engines that I really started to understand what they are and what they can do. What interests me is the idea that search engines are sociable because they primarily rely on human judgment for results. People are responsible for the content on the web and the placement of links. Search results do not come from some all knowing, ingenious machine, but pulls information from some sort of popularity contest that the public claims to be an expert in the area. They have established a community with web users where a person can say to another person, “Don’t know the answer? Google it,” and there is an instantaneous understanding to use a search engine to find the answer.

 

As a community, we all have the responsibility to provide the correct information, or at least provide a path for people to follow to the right answer. And as a user, we should make sure that we don’t just except the first answer that is given to us. There maybe trusted sites that we constantly go to for the answer, but like every good investigator/researcher, we should check our sources. Never stop asking questions, there’s a whole world of answers at our fingertips.

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~ by Cait on November 14, 2007.