Searching the Web
Chapter Three expanded upon my existing knowledge of search engines and their functions. Although I had already known about the basics of search engines from a previous class I took in Information Systems this past Summer, I did learn a bit more about the inner workings of a search engine, such as: Search Engine Optimization, differences in search engine databases and algorithms, and how natural language queries are handled via parsing. I also learned about HTML Meta Tags, how page ranking works, and search query stemming.
In addition, this Chapter taught me about search and logical operators. Although I already knew about the Quotes operator, the Site, Location, and Filetype search operators were new to me, and will prove useful in the future, whenever I need to search for something specific. I was already familiar with the use of logical operators in programming, but I didn’t know until now that they could be used in a search query. The end of the Chapter also reviewed webpage evaluation for accuracy, which were mostly common-sense practices I already knew to do, just from my previous experience on the internet.