How Google Search Works

This week's topic was on how google search works and further how it uses algorithms to power it's search engine, our tasks was to then share our knowledge and understanding via a podcast on audioBoom. audioBoom is a free website/application which enables users to explore, record and share sound files (podcast). The audio content on the website ranges from Business to Arts, Music to Comedy and Philosophy. audioBoom has content to appease everybody with its vast range of subject matter and with high-status people promoting it - such as Russell Brand - users are growing in number despite its recent release. As it says on audioBoom for Education, 'Audio enriches the curriculum' and 'engages the learner' and I strongly agree with this as in conventional educational environments, learning is biased towards visual learners and auditory/kinesthetic learners are expected to be able to produce results of similar standards to those who have a clear preference for it. But I believe that knowing and understanding all three learning styles will be very advantageous in our future as students, in any subject and even after we leave school so it is necessary to develop all three educational techniques. So even those whose dominant learning style is not auditory will benefit from audioBoom as it forces them to not only rely on what they're best at, which can debilitate a student's true potential but to train their cognitive skills so that they may be comfortable when needed to perform in such circumstances. 

 Should you wish to access my podcast, feel free to click on the following link:

How Google Search Works

I believe that Google is more successful than Bing and Yahoo because around a decade ago when it was starting up, was speed. The results were returned almost instantaneously within entering the search, which though now is not uncommon as most engines are fairly quick, was back then. The search algorithms: Google pioneered the form of crawling which returns far more relevant search results than Yahoo and Bing. Google has also exerted large amounts of effort in research of how to make computers interpret human language more efficiently. This translates to better results as the algorithm can search for what you mean and not just a collection of keywords. That the results are displayed in a consumable fashion is also and attractive feature of a search engine and I believe that people are drawn to the simplicity of it rather than the complicated interface of Yahoo which can be confusing initially. Finally, Google has multiple branches to it which cater to numerous fields such as Google Classrooms (educational), Google Mail (social/proffesional), Google Maps, Google Translate, etc., etc.

This week I have achieved an understanding of how Google Search works, about which I was clueless beforehand. I have also become comfortable with audioBoom and hope to use it in the future. A challenge I faced was the audioBoom app cutting out regularly when recording on my phone and then reopening it to find that the draft had not been saved and so in the future I will be sure to use the website instead. I could improve my learning by researching other search engines in greater detail.