Inside Internet Search Engines

On Tuesday we had the honor of having Chris Nolan, the Assistant University Librarian, come and talk to us about search engines and the web. He was able to teach me so many things that I did not know about the web. One thing that I had never heard before was that there is free program called Google Desktop that can be downloaded from the web. This program can be used to search the desktop of your computer and even all of your email. We also learned about how search engines such as Google operate and how they sort search results. One thing that surprised me was that one of the criteria for organizing top sites is how many links from other sites lead to the site, and ranks them higher for having links from authoritative sites.