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Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Findable Information

When we first started reading Morville’s text, I associated findability solely with negative connotations of my person being found by someone I did not want finding me. As we have worked our way through the text I have not only learned a lot but also have come to understand that finadability can be a very good thing, especially when you are dealing with information and your ability to find it.

We are constantly surrounded with information about everything, offers for products or events, why one product is better than another, who to vote for, how to change your own oil, etc. Sometimes we do not choose these things in examples such as fliers, but most of the time we are choosing the information we are looking at whether it be an on-line article or a social networking website. The point is that, as we have said in class a million times, whatever we want to know is at our finger tips. With a click of a button, it will be yours.

But is that really true? Also as we have worked through this book we have talked a lot about how Google works and whether or not it is truly functional and for what purpose it functions. I do not know a lot about Google except that they have some pretty lofty goals which include creating a computer that functions like a human brain. At this point, I am very skeptical. Google is incredibly hard to use for academic purposes. Or even just finding something reliable. If Google could come up with a computer-human-brain thing then why can they not come up with a better organizational system. Rather than having to dig through all the mess that ends up on the internet, people pay high sums of money for academic article databases.

It also makes me wonder if information really is at our finger tips. With new websites that give you all the instructions and tools to make your own site, for free, about anything you want, the internet has become bogged down with a massive amount of unhelpful and useless information that has to be sifted apart from the gold of reliable works. I ask my question again. Why do they not have a better organizational system? I just went to Google to look through what categories they offer. It would be a good idea for them to let people know about all the services they have, because if we used the tabs or categories or what you would like to call them, Googleing would be easier and more productive.

1 comment:

  1. The internet is a great source for quickly searching answers, however as you have stated, it can sometimes be an exhausting process. Google still manages to irritate the heck out of me because of it's inability to give me the information I'm really asking for. I feel that many people share this same frustration, though. It will be really interesting to see how the searching process and the internet evolves in the next 20 years.

    I too think that findability can be used for beneficial purposes. I do not like the idea that you can follow your children where they are going. I think that will only create more paranoid parents.

    The idea of a Google computer sounds like it can be very cool! But it's almost scary that they want it to be similar in operation to a human brain. Sometimes technology needs to draw the line, I do believe that it can go too far.

    Overall, I agree with everything you said!

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