Category Archives: Notable Websites

On National Public Radio this week, I listened to a fascinating episode of the show, “On the Media,” that featured a segment about an economist who analyzed Google search data for key words to assess levels of racism in different states.

The HackCollege website posted has a great, easy-to-read roundup of tips for mastering the art of search in Google.

Created by: HackCollege

On the Official Google Blog, there’s a new post with a video from Google discussing how search has evolved at the company over the years. What do you think Google needs to do next? What direction should they head in? What kinds of things can’t you search for easily in Google that you wish you could?

Google has a many different channels in YouTube. The company’s Google Privacy channel contains 49 videos that Google has uploaded about privacy. These will definitely be worth checking out if your research topic has something to do with privacy. Here are some the videos on this channel:

• “Google’s Privacy Principles”
• “Interest Based Advertising”
• “What Is a Cookie?”
• “What Is a Search Log?”
• “The Technology of Privacy: When Geeks Meet Wonks”

If you are ever looking for numbers on who is using different kinds of technology and how they are using it, your first stop for answers should be the Pew Research Center’s website for the Internet and American Life Project. Start with these parts of the website:

• Latest research (download reports on topics like “teens, kindness and cruelty on social network sites” or “Americans and text messaging”
• Trend data for adults and for teens
• Browse topics that connect you up to reports, data, and more

The section of the Google’s website that details the company’s efforts to be more transparent to the world offers an interesting page in which the company quantifies the number of requests from various countries in which data from Google was requested by a government or federal court or content indexed or hosted by Google was requested to be removed.

A recent episode of the weekly radio show, “On the Media,” featured a segment looking at the topic of Googlebombing, which can be defined as an effort to juice the Google search ranking system so that particular websites are at the top of the list of search results for certain words or phrases. In this episode, the host of the show interviewed a Google executive to talk about an old Googlebomb for “santorum” that is in the news again now that Senator Santorum is running as a GOP primary candidate for the presidency.