Chapter Three

Did you know I hate spiders? Random, maybe, but I didn’t understand how Google, Bing, and other search sites obtained information; maybe they pulled key terms from every possible website and filtered them by relevance? Instead, I learned they use web robots (or spiders, hence the introduction) to update their databases automatically—quite handy, honestly! If we had to manually update that ourselves, I could only imagine how droll the career would be along with the immense labor costs. Furthermore, it makes sense that each search engine has a unique database, but why are their valuations on hits different? Are there copyright laws involved, or are they all seeing different information?

Reading about Wikipedia gave me a chuckle, too. Every single teacher and professor I’ve had always insisted that it couldn’t be a primary source or even a viable source at all, which is partially valid; users create their own accounts and choose what information they include for their citation (if any at all), but there’s still function for these giant dumps on more popular articles. For example, you can scroll down to the bottom and follow the citations listed to check their validity; then, either use the information it directly cites on the page or track down and look at the source itself. Is it unreliable? Sure, but it has a usage.