Searching the Internet

Something that I learned from Chris Nolan's presentation was the directories that are available for use on the Internet. These directories give a good amount of sites on vast subjects and the best part is that they come from recommendations of libraries around the country. This assures you that you are getting sites that have been previously visited and the previewer believed the information was accurate and useful enough to recommend. I will surely use directories such as, Infomine or Librarians' Internet Index the next time I do a research paper. One aspect of the presentation that surprised me was the fact that Google insists they do not rank websites based on how often they are visited. Even though Mr. Nolan himself sounded skeptical, Google claims they rank the websites that appear during a search based on: how often other sites link to a site, how often the search words are repeated in a site, and also whether the search words appear in the title of the site or perhaps just in a small, insignificant paragraph. Although I too believe that Google must take site visits into some consideration when it ranks its websites, they must know what they are doing as Google is by far my preferred search engine.