Internet Search Engines

This week our discussion in class was the effect of internet search engines on society. In the past you'd have to go to the library or look up a number in a local telephone directory book. Today however 'Google' has become a verb in our society.

 One of my classmates made a great point about how far we've come just in the sense of looking up telephone numbers. The student mentioned how we used to have to wait for the updated version of the Yellow Pages phone book to show up to the house to get numbers for contractors, pizza shops, and bakeries. Today, you can either go to the Yellow Pages online or you can type into a google search the type of business you are looking for and it will automatically return businesses with their listed phone numbers within a certain radius of your computer's IP address. As a result, the student, like many of us, take that Yellow Pages phone book that we get and put it right into the recycling bin for the next week's collection.

 The other common theme throughout the discussion was how internet searches have changed how we use the library. I remember being in school full-time and dreading spending my weekend doing research in a library. Now with just some filtering as to what websites are providing legitimate information, you can do most, if not all, of your research for a project by using search engines. Some university libraries even allow for students to access some of their content online.

 Finally, I made the point of how we can now use the internet for product reviews, specifically when it comes to restaurants and makes/models of cars. By just typing in the name of the restaurant you want to eat at into an internet search engine, you will get an instant return of hundreds of reviews on that particular restaurant. Although for every one bad review you can usually find an equally written positive review, if you start to see the same issues constantly come up, you can make your own determination. I personally just had an example of this while searching for a new car to buy. I'm looking for a 2nd car so I don't want to buy new simply for back and forth to work so I figured I'd take a look at used options. I came across several 2007 Jeep Grand Cherokee's that I was interested in. Reviews of the car however revealed that many people were having serious electrical problems that the dealership couldn't trace to a common problem. Sure enough if you type into a google search "Jeep Grand Cherokee" it will autofill with some of the most commonly searched for terms, one of which is "Jeep Grand Cherokee Electrical Problems".  This research made me immediately eliminate the Grand Cherokee from my list of vehicles that I'd look to purchase.

 I think search engines are really appreciated by those of us who are in our early 30s as we all remember in grade school having to go to the library, flip through that indexed card catalog, try to find the book on the shelf considering someone put it back in the right spot, and then finally putting pen to paper to complete a project, Today even this blog can be looked up just by typing the name of it into a search engine and is available for anyone to see,.