The power of Google is scary

I have to say that when it comes to providing information, Google is it ... the best!
msn and Yahoo! are more likely to feature business sites, Google on the other hand a variety of .edu sites and forums ... I would not rely on msn right now to find out information on a subject if a school paper depended on it

 

At the same time ST, most professors will tell you that if you depend on Google to conduct research that you will never graduate college.

 

Fry Man says " My main site was hit during the last update. Every single keyword vanished. I don't know what I did, but I triggered a penalty and got wiped out of Google. Not banned, just penalized."

Man i told you very early that this is happend but you guys were not beleving in me!
any way wat i can say then just SUFFER

 

I have a few sites that bounce in and out of google

one of which was pr zeroed and everything

now the pr 0 is back and ranks in google, must have been the those themed white hat hilltop ethical links I got for it

 

I respectfully disagree. I do a ton of preliminary research online before moving on to reserach articles, etc. All i use is yahoo. I have tried google and msn, but they provide the worst results.

I suppose it all depends on what you are looking for. A lot of the research I do is not business oriented, so I dont' see a lot of business sites. I get mostly .edu , .gov or useful .com's for information whenever i use yahoo.

 

Quite true The internet may be great for a lot of things, but scientific research and data isn't really one of them. For that sort of important information (which is really what college students should be relying on), one still needs to go to the library

 

I find the internet to be far superior to any library for researching the type of scientific subjects I'm interested in. The ability to search only .edu .gov sites is great, along with lots of top quality sites that can be counted on for reliable info.

From MIT Technology review, to FDA.gov, I find all that I need. I suppose it all depends what you're looking for.

 

Well, as a graduate student, I know that if i turned in a paper with only internet resources, i would fail. Quality research articles can really only be found in journals, which you can get online if you pay the fees, but it's cheaper to go use the databases at the library.

but as you say, it does depend on what you are looking for.

 

My experience is the opposite, Wendy. I also use SEs for research (medical, psychological, health, science mostly) and I definitely find the best results with Google.

 

The variety of resources Google supplies is so large that you can get a lot of free and quality information if you take the time to examine them.
Of course the pay journals are great for getting work done fast, especially when pressed with time, but when I want to really learn something and time is not an issue, I like going on Google and seeing a multitude of different people's takes on the subject matter.

Just MHO

 

Google starts off with indexing the index page. It doesn't (usually, or ever) do a full crawl on it's first visit to a website.

How long has your site been in the index?? If it's only been a short while (a couple of weeks or so), don't worry about it. A full crawl will be on it's way and might happen 4-6 weeks from the first time your site is crawled (or quicker). Include your site in the signature and it'll ensure that it's crawled heaps.

If it's been longer (months), post your URL and we will have a look.

 

well, you and i research similar information, as i'm in grad school for psych. i supposeeeeeeeeeee i'll give it another chance, maybe things have changed in the past few months and it won't piss me off so much with annoying results.

 

it's 4 am and everyone is on here ... what is wrong with you people
Anyways, I like variety, that's why I like Google. I dropped out of college and don't like any biased or one sided info. Google seems very unbiased in it's results. I believe in what they do even if many webmasters are upset with their algo.
It seems when I search msn and Yahoo! for info, I have to limit myself to a certain number of sites on the subject matter. That I don't like. I just realized why I still use Google so much ...

 

4 a.m.? 6 a.m. over here... getting my gear ready to go on my bike to the woods...

Nothing like a good exercise on a Sunday morning

 

I'm not claiming you won't get opinion sites, misinformation sites, and other stuff you don't want mixed in with the good stuff -- a lot of it is learning how to search, I think... how to add and refine keywords on the basis of the first SERPs to filter out the stuff that isn't useful to your particular query.

I didn't realize you were in psych -- what specialty?

 

Research and information experts will tell you that if you depend on Search Engines to conduct research that you will never learn enough to be considered an expert as only 1% of the available knowledge is indexed today.

Quote:

Users who consider Google exhaustive are only fooling themselves, experts say. Today's

search engines may be capturing as little as 1 percent of the Web, largely because of how

they find and index online resources.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1555521,00.asp

 

I'm currently in a grad program for mental health counseling. I plan on getting my PhD in Psych at some point after this, most likely in counseling as well. Before I got pregnant, married and moved away, I was working as a counselor for at risk teenage boys in the legal system. oddly enough, I really loved it

 

Cool. I do a lot of work with teens, including forensic/court work. You should think about dropping by the Psychlinks Forum at some point

 

I don't rely on ANY source or type of source exclusively.

Years ago, when I was doing my thesis, I kept seeing a finding cited by everyone in the area -- but (1) it was at odds with results I was getting and (2) even though it was about 5 years old it had never been published except as an abstract in Dissertation Abstracts. I ordered a copy of the original thesis from the Microfiche and, lo and behold, when it arrived I discovered that the published abstract was at best an overstatement of the findings and in my opinion a significant distortion of the results the author had actually obtained.

The first thing you are taught in research is to question and verify everything you see or read -- that's as true on the net as in the library.