Chris Nolan is the Assistant University Librarian. He came to our class to inform us on many of our favorite search engines, and specifically, Google. Mister Nolan gave the statistic that an astounding, 66.4% of internet users primarily use Google as their search engine of choice. Google brings in an astounding 40 billion dollars a year as a company, 90% of that revenue comes from ads alone. Despite its popularity, it turns out that not everything exists on Google, the search engine doesn't have access to all databases, so just because something can't be found on Google, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. In a surprising revelation we learned that each users individual search results go through what can be called a "filter bubble." Essentially the "filter bubble" has remembered other items that you have been interested in and shows you results that it thinks are going to to interest you. Google has a very complex algorithm to give you the results that end up appearing on the screen, and sometimes doesn't work perfectly, for example, scholarly items are listed later which might give the impression that they might not exist. Chris showed us a really interesting video on the search bubble we encounter everyday, the link is http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html.
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