Questions to Research for module1.html

Using Web Browsers

1-a. I am defaulted to the new tab page on Chrome. There is no url in the address bar for new tabs.
1-b. This appeared because it leads me to Google’s search bar, and also shows my most frequently visited websites. It is the default homepage for Chrome. If I go into Settings and then Appearances within the browser, there is an option to change the homepage.
2. You can change the font face and size and use other themes for Chrome. I would assume some of this is a personal design preference, but accessibility is another reason you would want to change your font for example. If you are vision impaired you might want a larger and easier to read font, or if bright light bothers you, you might want to use a darker theme (like I do).
3. Google is the default search engine. The new tab page as the Google search bar useable right from there, but you can also always type Google in to address bar too. Also, just typing a search into the address bar without going to Google.com will also automatically search in Google.

4-a. According to Google, the search yielded About 5,560,000,000 results. I would say, at least on page one, at least half are webpages that actually talking about making web pages. There are some that lead to forums, like Reddit, that are discussions about making web pages, and then other results are pages for courses about making web pages; so not offering the information directly.
4-b. This time I only got 12,100 results, and after two pages, not all were accessible to me. I would say this were less useful, as that specific phrase clearly isn’t as relevant when worded like that. Based on my results, I would say possibly less than half are relevant to web design, and even those are very old and dated.

5. The hits weren’t necessarily consistent among each search engine. In general, Google displayed many million more results than any other search engine. Most of these, if not all (at least on the first page of results) totally omitted Reddit and other forum posts, so I would say that is likely not a feature that is available for them (or maybe you can turn it on and off). It seems that Google’s algorithm in general, it’s search index, is just much more vast than any of these other ones. I’d say that probably makes sense since it has been around for much longer than the rest of these (that I know of) and is still operating at a high level to this day. I probably use Bing if I wanted a more concentrated amount of search results. It seem to filter out a lot of the junk I saw on Google. Yahoo was definitely more ad based, and Kartoo (which I’d never heard of) I’m assuming is an old and outdated search engine, as it yielded minimal results, and all of them were to dead links.
6. I would say that Wolfgram Alpha is not a search engine, but more of a search index. It has information that is stored on the website Wolfram, and that is what you are able to search for and pull up. It doesn’t create an algorithm that I can tell, and does not pull sites from across the web. Again, it seems to be pulling up data stored on the company’s own website, rather than from other websites.

7. Meta search engines gather information from multiple search engines at once and then produce their own results. There were plenty of results on web pages using dogpile; the sponsored websites were placed near the top and bottom of the page, with the other web results in the middle. Those were a little less in your face, and it was clear that the searcher was meant to be directed to the sponsored content first (company logos, larger fonts, bold type face, etc.). When I actually clicked on some of the non-sponsored results, I found them all to be pretty helpful in terms of designing web pages, with little to no filler results. I thought they were pretty well-optimized results.

8. I decided to use Bing for this part of the module
8-a. There is a way to search for multimedia, displayed at the top of the page.
8-b. You can search for both images and videos. For videos, there are sections for news, movies, music, sports and gaming. For images, there are sections for animals, photography, beauty, vehicles, art, women’s fashion, travel, gaming, design, fitness and exercise, and many more.
8-c. I searched for one of my favorite bands, Thrice, and got 256k results (though, I imagine not all had to do with the band). 8-d. When you do an image search, there is a toolbar above your results that gives you a “License” option, allowing you to refine your search to copyright free images only.
9. Creative Commons is an organization that gives out free copyright licenses so that images can be used and shared among the public. The answer to why you would want to use it to search for images lies in that first answer: you can use these images for free without worry of copyright law and having to pay the owner of a particular image.

10. I think one of the big things I learned is how much sponsored content is king when doing search results. I knew that in some regard already, but here I saw it across search engines I don’t normally use as well. Also, using Google, it’s clear how hard they are pushing AI, and how they want you to get an answer to your query without even clicking a single link (the AI answer is displayed first before any web page result). I think, if you can have helpful and unique specific phrases on your website (that would only come up using quotation marks), that could be beneficial, as your website would be more likely to come up in a search engine using that phrase. I think researching and finding out what would work best in that regard could possible help your SEO. Otherwise, that slow community building that was talked about in the "How Search Engines Rank Pages" article seems the best way to get your page seen more, even if that might take years to do.