Know Your Search Engines and Be Critical

It is common knowledge that if a search fails to retrieve information within a couple of seconds, most surfers will click away and try someplace else. In those few seconds, as the [search] engine crawls through millions of links, many problems need to be solved--the biggest problem of whcih is called the "verbal disagreement problem." Verbal disagreement means that if you have a certain concept in mind and you ask two people to describe it, they will give you two completely different, but entirely correct, words. Conversely, two people using the same word could be talking about entirely different concepts. The Internet magnifies that problem immensely.

Specter, Michael. "Search and Deploy." The New Yorker 29 May 2000: 88-100.

Verbal disagreement is not a problem unique to searching the internet. One could say that verbal disagreement exists among scholarly disciplines where terms have different meanings/applications. To be a good researcher, you must remain sensitive to communities and how they use language, whether you use the web or a print index.

One of the best resources for understanding search engines and how they work is the site http://www.searchenginewatch.com.

There, take a look at the following sections

• Search Engine Math
• Power Searching for Anyone
• Search Engine Features for Searchers

Working with materials on the web requires constant critical thinking, as much or more so when you conduct other types of research. Do not rely on superficial characteristics of a scholarly publication as a guarantee of authority. Notice that this web site spoofs such authority: Feline Reactions to Bearded Men.

Assess the validity of this site: http://www.dhmo.org.