Journals 1,

Journal 1

In the article “Your Google Guide”, author Doug Johnson takes a look at the search engine Google and provides readers with some easy tips for effective online searching. Some excellent suggestions include putting searches in the form of a question and learning how to use search operators effectively. Johnson includes some revealing facts about internet searches from author John Battelle’s The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, such as how nearly 50% of all Google searches use two or three words and 20% use just one word. Also fascinating is that an estimated 80% of Google searchers never proceed past the first page of results and have never used the more effective “advanced search” feature. In the end, Johnson states that the most obvious and yet most important tip in getting useful results in Google is to first and foremost “know what you’re looking for.”

Questions

1. How did Google become so popular? Is it just that good at finding things? How?

Johnson says that we as searchers use Google to the exclusion of nearly every other search tool on the Internet. But why? He writes that “the genius behind Google and its effectiveness comes from the method by which it orders the pages it finds” and that Google ranks its results by the number of links from other websites that a given page has.

2. How can Google afford to pay for all of its free services such as Google Earth, Google documents, and Gmail?

In the article, Johnson says the beauty of Google is that its users don’t know the difference between sponsored links and the real internet results.