Week Four Blog, (1) and 2 (b)

The first part of the week four tutorial task required me to look up online journals or articles. I chose to use the avenue of newspaper websites for the simple fact of, they give a reasonably educated point of view on a large array of subjects, and, I am studying journalism. The topic that I began researching was the internet and how it can cause people to become introverted and lonely. I found one journal article on this topic from the Australian Journal of Emerging Technologies and Society. However, this was too limited a topic so I decided to research about two aspects of the internet. The avenues that I researched these through were what I said before, newspapers. I found some articles related to the internet being used as a tool for sex offenders and also, how the internet is killing off the dvd sales of pornographic material.

The article about the internet being used as a tool for sex offenders focused on myspace, and how convicted offenders were able to set up accounts. The article was titled, Myspace outs sex predators. At first, myspace claimed that it could not reveal the sex offending accounts owners names due to privacy disclosure laws. However, under pressure from the U.S government, it yielded and subsequently set up a software program called, 'Sentinel Safe'. Since this software was installed on March 2nd of this year it has deleted 7000 sex offending profiles. The program doesn't simply delete the profiles though, it takes down the names and contact information of sex offenders for government officials.

I retrieved the second article from the Sydney Morning Herald. It focused on how he internet was supposed to be a 'boon' for the pornographic market. However while internet sales are still steadily increasing, dvd sales have been rapidly decreasing. This is due mostly to the easily accessibility of pornographic material from the pc via the internet. As well as this, the article focused on how, because of sites such as google video and youtube, anyone with a camera and 'two people that want to have sex' can make a pornographic video. The article was titled, Internet takes the lash to porn.

Question 2b required me to answer some questions about search engines.
- What is a search engine? A search engine is a system of retrieving information on a computer, whether it is through the internet and world wide web or just on the computers hard drive. However, in this instance, through the internet and world wide web.
- How do search engines rank the stuff they find on the internet?

The way that search engines rank what they find varies immensely from one search engine to another. This usually determines the success of a search engine; whether it ranks stuff effectively and returns what the searcher is looking for.

- Who, or what, makes one page (that you might get in your search results) more useful than another one, so that it is put at the top of your search results?

From what I can gather, it depends on the keywords that are entered, in collaboration with boolean operators that determines what turns up and how relevant it is. Also, some search engines use the spacing between key words as a method of searching as well.

- What are some of your favourite search engines? Why do you like one more than others?

My favourite search engines are google and wiki. The reason why I like them is because of how they rank the information and the vastness of the information that they can locate.

- Can you find some current news stories about search engines? )for example, Google has been in the technology news a bit lately).
Google takes online software applications offline, Mylivesearch aims for beta to better.