Chris Nolan Presentation

Chris Nolan's presentation on searching the Internet was very informative and taught me a lot of useful tips for being much more efficient in that aspect. Many of the tips were about effective techniques for narrowing searches to access the exact information that you are looking for. And because Google is the most popular search engine, it was the search engine specifically addressed. One technique that I learned was how to narrow searches to a specific type of URL. By going to the advanced search window, you can specify whether you wish to view only sites that are .com, .gov, .org, etc. This is useful because it can lead to more reliable sources. There are other simple techniques that I learned that can be applied directly in the search box. By putting quotes around a phrase, it allows you to search for those specific words in the order that you want them. Another way to narrow the search is to subtract key words from the search. Perhaps the most useful way I learned to narrow the search was to select the Google Scholar section. For college research, it is necessary to use these resources. I was surprised at how much searches could be narrowed down and also at how inefficient I was and how little I really knew about using search engines.