I had viewed Time’s Magazine Corpus for another exercise previously this semester. I find the search engine to be somewhat fascinating but somewhat dry. The information available is useful and interesting, though, the format of the website could use some creativity..

So I then proceeded to explore Google’s Ngram Viewer which graphs key words or names in books from the 1800’s on, and where these spats of information can be found in texts. If you click on a particular name, such as Coco Chanel, then the link directs you to the books that feature that name is some way, like a biography or a fashion related novel.

Thinking about the abundance of information available on the web is somewhat overwhelming and also a little dizzying. I find these search engines to be useful, though, the amount of time trying to navigate the information you need can ultimately end up to be frustrating.

After exploring these engines I read “From Babel to Knowledge” which I found more interesting because it not only explained how digital information is gathered and used, but it also explained how it is compiled behind the scenes. Academia strives to make sense of all of the information available, that the use of API’s only enhances those using the engines experience.

I found the syllabus finder to be very useful considering the time spent on focusing on key concepts throughout a class.

With the abundance of information on the web it is time to condense these search technique to make it easier to navigate information and get detailed summaries of what we are trying to find on the web.