GOOGLE Search - Your best friend for finding anything and everything.

Kelly wrote that "In the near future we will never be far from a screen from some sort.  Screens will be the first place we’ll look for answers, for friends, for news, for meaning, for our sense of who we are and who we can be" (Kelly, 2016).  Since 1997, GOOGLE has been one of the most visited sites to gather information from the Internet.  If you've ever used Google, as I'm sure the majority of people under the age of 50 have, you know that you can ask it absolutely anything and everything and get an answer... however, it may not be the answer you're looking for, which is why I offer this quick tutorial.

For instance, if I want to know how the service is at Johns Hopkins hospital, I may just ask that simple question. This is what I see when I simply type the question. To the right of the search bar, there is also a microphone, where you can speak your question into with an enabled microphone. They are becoming more and more user friendly, especially for those with impairments that may not have been able to utilize these services just a few years ago.

However, if you are really looking for ratings and review on specific services, you don't really have to ask a question, you can string a series of keywords into the search tool, and it will pull back different, and hopefully more relevant results. The more information you can give Google, the better your results will be. 

Even though this may still not give you the information you're looking for, it does pull up more information, including direct links to the hospital itself and 3 different options for reviews. This is one of the downsides of using Google Search - information overload.  If you look closely, there are over 164Million results. There is also an internal web rating system that Google employs to rank each site based on many different factors.  You see more and more often that there are "Ads" at the tope of almost every search.  This is how Google is making money in the recent times. So again, the relevancy of your search could be skewed by those that pay for a top spot.  This again is a good reason to put as many keywords into your search, or minus (-) out the information you're NOT looking for.

For instance, what if I really wanted to see the services at Johns Hopkins UNIVERSITY rather than the hospital, I could enter this into the search.  Now you can see that reviews of JHU are now at the top of the list.

On this same page, you have the option to click on NEWS, IMAGES, SHOPPING, MAPS and MORE Here's what I see when I click on NEWS  It will take you to all the most recent news stories.

For those of us completing research and writing scholarly papers,  you could also use Google Scholar https://scholar.google.com/ for peer-reviewed information,  Here is the scholarly search return on Johns Hopkins reviews 

I'm also including a link to a Wikipedia article on getting better results with a Google Search.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Search

This information is found on that site

Search syntax

Google search accepts queries as normal text, as well as individual keywords. It automatically corrects misspelled words, and yields the same results regardless of capitalization. For more customized results, one can use a wide variety of operators, including, but not limited to:

• OR – Search for webpages containing one of two similar queries, such as marathon OR race
• - (minus sign) – Exclude a word or a phrase, such as "apple -tree" searches where word "tree" is not used
• "" – Force inclusion of a word or a phrase, such as "tallest building"
• * – Placeholder symbol allowing for any substitute words in the context of the query, such as "largest * in the world"
• .. – Search within a range of numbers, such as "camera $50..$100"
• site: – Search within a specific website, such as "site:youtube.com"
• define: – See a definition of a word, such as "define:phrase"
• stocks: – See the stock price of investments, such as "stocks:googl"
• related: – Find webpages related to specific URL addresses, such as "related:www.wikipedia.org"
• cache: – Highlights the search-words within the cached pages, such as "cache:www.google.com xxx" shows cached content with word "xxx" highlighted.
• @ – Search for a specific word on social media networks, such as "@twitter"

Query expansion

Google applies query expansion to submitted search queries, using techniques to deliver results that it considers "smarter" than the query users actually submitted. This technique involves several steps, including:^[32]

• Word stemming – Certain words can be reduced so other, similar terms, are also found in results, such as "translator" can also search for "translation"
• Acronyms – Searching for abbreviations can also return results about the name in its full length, such as "NATO" can show results for "North Atlantic Treaty Organization"
• Misspellings – Google will often suggest correct spellings for misspelled words
• Synonyms – In most cases where a word is incorrectly used in a phrase or sentence, Google search will show results based on the correct synonym
• Translations – The search engine can, in some instances, suggest results for specific words in a different language
• Ignoring words – In some search queries containing extraneous or insignificant words, Google search will simply drop those specific words from the query

Kelly, K. (2016) The inevitable: understanding the 12 technological forces that will shape our future. New York, New York: Viking.

 

The World is Evolving. 

“The World is Flat” (Friedman, 2007) and “The World is Spkiy” (Florida, 2005) were both written long before Internet commerce was a popular ‘thing’.  They were also written prior to the global pandemic which thrust everyone back into their homes to fend for themselves, and forced people to come up with new ways to hunt and gather products needed for survival.

I don’t think that the world is either ‘flat’ or ‘spiky’, but an adaptation of both depending upon the circumstances of life. The Internet (Which Friedman didn’t list as one of the top 10 “flatteners) has allowed every person with a connection to become an entrepreneur of sorts or a buyer. 

Luckily, the likes of Amazon, EBay, InstaCart and others were already poised to make shopping from home an instant reality, although, they needed to expand operations practically overnight.  But that’s another discussion.

Selling platforms mentioned earlier are more accessible and easier to use than ever before.  In 2020, e-commerce sales in the United States increased by 44% over that of 2019, and they raked in 21.3% of total sales in 2020, which is honestly less than I expected due to the pandemic (Fareeha, 2021).

After just a few weeks, when it was evident this issue wasn’t going to go away quickly, many people lost their jobs, and/or began trying to find alternative ways to continue to support themselves and their families.  They turned to working online by selling their wares or their services, or both.  Many major companies also sent their employees home to work, which caused platforms such as ZOOM to expand bandwidth also practically overnight. Every single person on the planet had to adapt to the changing environment.

Once the world gets back to normal, if that ever happens, I wonder which direction the future of commerce will turn.

 

Fareeha, A. (2021, Jan. 29). US ecommerce grows 44.0% in 2020. Digitalcommerce360. https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/article/us-ecommerce-sales/

The World Is Flat (2021, Jul 21). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Is_Flat

Florida, Richard. (2005). The world is spiky: The Atlantic Monthly. The World is Spiky. 48-51.