Journal # 1

The first journal for this week was titled "Your Google Guide," by Doug Johnson. In this article, Johnson writes about the search engine Google and claims that people know little about the way it works. He wants everyone to admit that they use it, and as well, admit that they don't use it as it should be used. Johnson explains the basic use of Google listing different tasks reguarding its abilities. He first states that to correctly use Google, the user must first be able to identify what it is he/she is going to be searching. Once that is established, Johnson gives us a helpful tip my stating that a search will be more effective if it is stated in the form of a question. This is something that was helpful to me because I had no idea a question was better than a few key words. A major idea Johnson brought up was the fact that he believed that all schools should be automatically set to "advanced search" when logging on to Google's home page. Johnson believes the advanced search tool is better than the regular search tool because it helps to narrow down the topic being searched for. Johnson ends his article telling the readers to sign up for the Google Librarian Central Newslater. I had no idea something like this even existed. I thought this was a great idea. Something else I liked about the article was the different statistics located in the big orange box. For example, it was interesting to see that 80% of the Google users don't even venture past the first page. I knew this had to be true because I am guilty of being one of those people. If it's not on the first page, I don't even bother, and I guess 80% of the people don't even bother as well!


Question 1: What does the word "Google" even mean?

The word "Google" is a play on a word meaning a certain number. It is a play on the number googol which is a 1 followed by 100 zeros. It looks something like this: 10,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That's a lot of zeros! Count them, I dare you! The founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted something to represent the endless amount of growing information that can now be found on the search engine.

Question 2: What is the easiest way to find something on Yahoo!?

The answer to this is easy! Google it instead. Google has continuoulsy beat out Yahoo to remain the best search engine on the web. Does Yahoo have a Yahoo Earth? Nope. But Google does. You can search just about anything on Google, even Google itself. Yahoo is too much of a copycat finding any way to possibly use the two "00's" to appear just as sophisticated as Google. Google even goes as far as changing the way "Google" appears on the home page from time to time. During Christmas the word Google was spelled out with Christmas lights. Did Yahoo do that? Nope. That's why Google is the best. Period.