A visit by Chris Nolan!

No not the director of the batman movies! A Trinity Internet guru seeking to pass over his skills of web searching and site evaluation to the lucky (and rather sleepy) attendants of CS 1300 @ 8:30.
Because pretty much all college students use Google as their search engine of choice, the majority of his presentation centered around how to use Google more effectively. But first a tiny briefing on Google. Google ranks its search results by the occurrence of the words searched, where those words appear, and (their signature feature) popularity links. Google profit is derived from advertising certain websites, but these sites appear off to the side of the returned search and are not supposed to affect the ordering of results. However, the finer details of how Google ranks search results is kept secret so marketers, kept one step behind Google, can't manipulate the search engine.
What I found most fascinating about Nolan's presentation were all the extra tidbits Google provides to help narrow down a search to help you find precisely what you want. I'm talking about advanced functions. Only want a certain type of website (say .gov or .edu) or only Spanish ones? You actually have the ability to make these specifications. Not that I had any idea. Formerly, I tended to glaze over the actual Google page, spewing in my information and choosing the first websites that satisfied my not-too-high standards. The problem with this method was most glaring whem I searched for scholarly articles for school projects. Real scholarly sites tend to be less viewed than say Time.com, and are buried deep within search results. However, Google has a secret option called "Google Scholar", known only to those who analyze the homepage. Now the Trinity Library won't be my only source for academic articles!
Mr. Nolan touched on other topics as well, like how to evaluate a web page (check out the "about this site" tab), but the information on Google was the most useful for myself.