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This article describes the benefits of search engine alternatives to the mighty Google. In doing so, it also reveals how much information Google keeps on you every time you do a search. 

after reading this article my first thought was "Awesome, new sites I can Google on!"

I came across this as I was looking for history of search engines and its pretty crazy that the site Topsy has been able to save every single tweet since twitter launched! that's 300 billion tweets!!! and you can search them all as it is open to the public. I hadn't heard about Topsy but it seems like they are gaining a good reputation and going against big search engines like Yahoo and Bing.

Another good Common Craft video about search engine optimization -- says that "Google and Bing are the librarians of the Internet." Interesting, and a total coincidence, that this video also uses the notion of a "recipe" to explain how to make your website more searchable -- the same analogy I used to explain an algorithm.

Since we were talking about search engines last class, I found this interesting. Heres a list of different types of search engines and what they are mainly used for.

The list that has all possible search engines for almost anything.

A nice little video from A New Zealand library explaining the difference between a search engine and a database. I noticed a bit of confusion about this on exam 2.

Big news today: a ten-year-old lawsuit about Google Book Search has been resolved in Google's favor -- basically, the law has ruled that it was okay for Google to scan in-copyright books because it had no plans to publish the whole version of those in-copyright books online in http://books.google.com. Compare this to what we've heard about celebrity photographs and Pinterest. Here's a quotation from the story: "When Google started work on its book search engine a decade ago, the company realized that getting the approval of copyright holders would be a logistical nightmare. Not only would major publishers likely demand high fees for permission to scan their books, but for many older works, it would be difficult to even figure out who the appropriate copyright holder was. So Google took a gamble, scanning library books without seeking copyright holders' permission and relying on copyright's fair use doctrine as a justification."

Do you like privacy? Do you shun surveillance and eschew spam? Do you like simplicity? If you answered yes to any of those questions, you'll love DuckDuckGo. DuckDuckGo is the brainchild of everyday American Gabriel Weinberg, and until news of the National Security Agency's widespread spying program broke last month, it was a baby brainchild.

A few weeks late to be that relevant but I thought this was really kind of cool.

This website provides a list of 20 shortcuts you can use google for. This list explains how you can maximize the google search engine in order to find a wide variety of information quickly. Enables the user to use google to answer everyday questions easily.

Its Google's Birthday today and It seems like the giant among search engines is still continuing to push for better service. I noticed that my google format had changed and I found out it was because Hummingbird, its new search algorithm that gives better search results.

I was still a little confused on what a web crawler was exactly. I thought this site was helpful.

Yes, it is! I've already given you credit for one link this week, but that is a good explanation -- even though the page it was last updated in 2005 and the search engine it gives as an example is Alta Vista. :) Alta Vista doesn't even exist anymore; it was acquired by Yahoo awhile ago, I think. Here's the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista

Ya I saw the date, but felt the explanation was good.