Chris Nolan's Presentation

I learned quite a few things from Chris Nolan’s presentation. The first being that I didn’t know you could narrow your search on Google so well. I didn’t know you could type “Define: Whatever” and it would come up with definitions. I didn’t know you could exclude certain kinds of websites by using the keywords. I also never understood all the aspects of the advanced search (limiting domain, setting language, limit dates, set number of results, etc.) because I hardly used it (but now that I know how I can use it and use it efficiently).

I thought the differences between the search results of Google vs. Yahoo were also very interesting. I had also never used Google scholar and so that was nice to have how it worked (picked “scholarly” results) explained to me. I will definitely be using that and Infomine as part of my research now instead of regular Google and the Trinity library website.

I was surprised that we evaluated websites near the end. I felt, at least with the website that I had about white supremacy, that it was obvious that the site was not a credible source of historical information. I think it surprised me that we did this because I feel that a lot of students can, for the most part, determine what credible websites are. For example, I feel that it is common knowledge that Wikipedia can be altered by anyone and that it should not be cited as a scholarly source.