...and Why You Should Be Careful
The most popular search engine is Google. It answers billions of searches per month (http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2066918/Almost-12-Billion-U.S.-Searches-Conducted-in-July). Over the course of one day, many people use Google to learn the weather forecast, read the news, order nearly anything, research for school, locate a restaurant, find driving directions to that restaurant, and decide what to watch on television.
The most popular search engine is Google. It answers billions of searches per month (http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2066918/Almost-12-Billion-U.S.-Searches-Conducted-in-July). Over the course of one day, many people use Google to learn the weather forecast, read the news, order nearly anything, research for school, locate a restaurant, find driving directions to that restaurant, and decide what to watch on television.
Google is useful, but it cannot find everything. You might need to find scholarly articles for
a research paper. Google is better at
finding popular sources than scholarly ones, but your professors probably will
require you to use scholarly articles.
(To understand the difference between scholarly and popular resources,
read the blog post “What Is a Scholarly Article?” at http://ihelib.blogspot.com/2012/01/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none_23.html.)
Google can find some scholarly articles, but most can be
found on databases. Remember that your
Jersey City Free Public Library card (and you, as an IHE student, can get one--see
http://www.jclibrary.org/resources/jcfpl-library-card
) allows you to use resources such as EBSCOhost, HealthyNJ, JerseyClicks, and
PubMed that can help you find scholarly articles that Google cannot. See http://www.jclibrary.org/resources/online-resources
for links to these and other resources.
Google can be controversial.
For example, it saves information about people who use Google. This can help police catch criminals, In
other words, if someone tried to Google, “Ways to kill grandma”, the police might
learn about this and suspect the searcher of murder. Here is an article about how a history of
someone’s Google searches led to a murder conviction: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10150669-38.html.
It is not just the police who can learn about people’s
search history: companies can target
advertisements to people based on “harvested” information about how people use
Google. Did you use Google to find out
about a singer? That singer’s company
would like to know, and so would other music companies. Some
people consider this a violation of privacy (http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/business/2012/02/13/lawsuit-targets-googles-new-privacy-policy.html). Another concern: What if a criminal uses harvested information
to figure out where someone lives?
Does this mean that you should not use Google? That’s up to you, but if you do, you might
want to consider that other people might learn about how you are using it. Actually, you are using Google right
now: Google hosts Blogger, which this
blog is on.
Google can do a lot, perhaps more than you realize. You can read about different Google
applications at these pages:
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