An obstacle many people run into while researching on the internet is not having the endurance to dig deeper and make sure you have the right and true facts. They just want to take the first answer they come across because it is the easiest. The problem with this is that when you search for something in a search engine, the results are simply catering to the nature of your query. It is your job to sift through them, discerning if they are reliable or not. With time and practice you can work on your double-checking/digging skills. In this article I will reveal some things you may not know about the internet, highlight reasons it is important to at least know some of the basics, and demonstrate my own personal experiences and thoughts with regards to the internet.
Actively looking for opinions that differ from yours in order to gain different perspectives is a sign of a seasoned researcher. Most people today have an over confidence in their search abilities, especially young people. A humble person can accept that there is a vast amount of information out in the web and being wrong sometimes is just a fact of life. You will never be able to become the best researcher you can be without a little humility. I myself am not naturally a person who easily understands technology but knowing that, I can accept help from and admire people who do understand it. Everyone has their areas of expertise. My brother in fact is very gifted with technology. It is really his passion and so anytime our family has technical issues we call him. It is a way for us to have easy access to technological help and also a way to show my brother that we acknowledge he is talented in that area and we respect his expertise.
Many searches you make in a day are pretty simple. You are just looking for a website, which would be a navigational query, or for a short piece of information, which would be an informational query. As your query becomes more complex there are some things you can do to improve the quality of your results. You can change or add terms into your search phrase in order to narrow your results down to the topic that you are looking for. You can also have multiple tabs open in order to experiment with what differing searches give you. You can get even more specific by using the phrases site:(to search within a website) and filetype:(to search for a specific file type such as PDF) or you can use double quotation marks to search for a specific phrase in a specific order. One trick I learned was to press Command-F in order to search for specific text within a website.
The best trick to use though is built right into your own brain. That is your critical thinking ability. As you are searching double check your results. Make sure what you searched for is specific enough to direct you to your unique query. You have to bring your critical thinking with you every time you search for something if you really want to get the most authentic results. Very often I am tempted to just go with the first answer I find when searching for something(and I often I do), but I remind myself to look through multiple websites and compare. For example, when I’m looking for a recipe I don’t just use the first recipe that comes up. I look through many recipes of the same dish, comparing other people’s reviews, differing ingredients and their affects, the recipe writer’s credibility or level of experience, etc. Its important to soak up differing information and then compare everything you have learned before you make a conclusion.
Knowing how to search for something is important, but it is also important to know what is going on behind the scenes when you search. Here I can give you a few processes for how the web works. When you search for a website, the website code is not located on your computer so you need another computer called a server to find it for you. The website you are looking for has a specific IP(Internet Protocol) address. When you search for that website, your computer sends a request to the server with that IP address. First though, your browser has to fetch the IP address translation from a DNS server(Domain Name System). This process is the process of your URL(Uniform Resource Locator) getting resolved. Once the IP address is found the request is sent to the server containing that address. When the request is made a data package is sent to this server through the “Hyper Text Transfer Protocol” or HTTP. This defines what the request needs to look like. Then this server returns the request with a response which shows up to you in the form of a website. Before you can actually see the website however, the response must be parsed by your browser. The browser reviews the data and goes from there. One piece of this data would perhaps tell the browser that it is type html which allows the browser to parse it as html code.
HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language and it is a core programming language that describes the structure of a webpage. Html gives the website structure while CSS(Cascading style sheets) gives it style. Javascript is another programming language that gives you more dynamic content for a website that programmers can control how you see on your browser. Being open to learning more is very important to becoming a good web searcher. I didn’t even know what http stood for until I researched for this post but since I took the time to read and be open to learning, I now know something new that before I had taken for granted.
Learning all these things is quite overwhelming and honestly boring to me mostly, but even so, it is important and even interesting when you give it a chance. In spite of my not having a natural interest or skill with technology or the internet, I learned more about its importance, creation, and processes that I would not have known otherwise. Because of this, the next time I need to research something, I will be just that much wiser in how I go about it.
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