Click Restraint: Crash Course Navigating Digital Information #9

Click restraint steps

(1) Don't click instantly (2) Scan the result titles and URLs (3) Scan the snippets below the URL (4) Compare your results (5) Use your lateral reading to determine trustworthiness

Google returns results are based on

(1) How relevant it thinks a page will be to what you searched for (2) the quality of the site based on google's own definition of quality.

Since linking to other sites can impact search results, some creators

even create websites to link to their website.

Algorithms are not objective. There is always

going to be a degree of human influence, even if that degree is supposed to be small.

Patience

is a hard earned skill for humans. Especially when you are hungry.

Fact checkers spend more time on

search results than everyone else does. Typically they scroll through the entire first page of search results, and sometimes even the second or third page.

expertise

specialized skill or technical knowledge; know-how; expertness

speculation

the forming of a theory or conjecture without firm evidence

ubiquity

the state of being everywhere at once (or seeming to be everywhere at once)

When you enter a keyword into any search engine, it doesn't spit out a list of sources based on

trustworthiness.

If you are not finding the kind of results you need when conducting a search try . . .

(1) Put the phrase you are searching for in quotation marks (2) Put in a domain name as in Site: youtube.com (3) To eliminate certain words or websites, include a minus sign before the word

corroborate

(v.) to confirm, make more certain, bolster, substantiate, verify

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Combines art along with science to determine how to make URLs more attractive to search engines resulting in higher search engine ranking

Quality is a little harder to determine than relevancy. Search engines use determiners like

How many other sites link to a result, and whether those sites are of high quality. Some companies pay individuals to rate the quality of pages it finds in search.

click restraint

Instead of immediately clicking the first thing they see, fact checkers restrain themselves. They scan to check out their options first and then make informed decisions about which websites to visit first.

satirical

Using sarcasm or sharp wit to expose human vice or weakness

Algorithm

a set of rules or operations a computer follows to complete a task

Humans create and manage search engines, so the results they produce via complex algorithms

are not somehow separate from human fallibility.