Finding the best answers to our questions in a sea of online information is increasingly difficult. Luckily, we have search engines to help us.
Yet it’s important to remember that while search engines make it easier to find information, they can also be limiting, especially when we start using one exclusively.
It’s a question of whether we want to trust a search engine to find all the answers for us, or take the time to search farther afield using more tools. Boolean language, which uses certain codes to modify search terms, and other techniques exist for a reason — they get better results for the user.
Letting a search engine do the work gives up control over the search. For example, Google’s page-ranking system determines the relevance of all possible results and ranks them accordingly based on what it thinks is important.
Websites capitalize on this by hiring search engine optimization companies to tweak their content so they rank higher. This makes for a lot of people trying to determine what we’ll actually see when we run a search.
Google is now the dominant search engine, and with the addition of Google Plus and other features, it seeks to make itself the ultimate online experience, fulfilling all academic, social and casual needs. A user never needs to leave.
But other search engines like Yahoo and Bing use different techniques and methods of organization, resulting in different search answers. Although there are fewer search engines now than in the past, it’s important that we make use of all of them to increase the diversity of the information we get, rather than trust just one. In the end, we want to be the masters of the search, not the slaves.