Chapter 3
Chapter 3 of the book had some interesting content. The first being stemming, the process of taking combinations of terms in the search to expand the number of results. This reminded me of Wikipedia speed running where you connect to seemingly innocuous topics to each other relatively quickly. I don’t know if it was a trend or if I just saw one person do it but the video that comes to mind is one where they managed to connect Ariana Grande to Pikachu to Donald Trump. As I’m writing this, I realize that it’s the opposite of stemming because the results should be as relevant as possible for querying, but the connection made sense to me. The Wikipedia speed running was really interesting because of the lengths you must go to connect these random topics and get to different wiki pages. Whereas stemming as described by the textbook seems to take the verbs of the search terms to query.
Another interesting thing was evaluating web resources. The criteria for credible sources is something that comes up in every single class that asks for research, mostly English classes, and there is a method that I’ve developed for research papers since high school, so I’ve tuned out the repetition over the years. But recently I had to look at resources beyond credible sources. I was looking into opening a bank account and there were a couple banks that I completed discounted because of the website layout. I couldn’t tell you about the account types or interest rates offered because those sites were either visually overstimulating or so complicated to get around that the content of those websites weren’t even worth considering. Form and appearance is something that I don’t usually pay attention to but for a bank I do think they could shell out a few bucks for a good web design.