Well, I'd say I'm actually quite indifferent towards the Google search engine. To me, these search engines are just tools for knowledge, but I guess, that looking at it from a different perspective, they are quite good.
I mean, even though more often than not, the websites the search engines give us are irrelevant to what we were searching for, but nobody said that additional knowledge was a bad thing. However, it is that exact problem that makes search engines so frustrating sometimes.
The websites given are frequently irrelevant, and if you're someone who was trying to do a project, that irrelevancy just takes up time, time that you might not have if the deadline's coming up.
Most search engines try to cut down these instances by sorting the websites according to how relevant they think those websites are, and giving us a summary of what the websites are about. Unfortunately, how relevant the websites are to them, may have drastic differences as compared to how relevant the websites are to us.
Now, I know that these problems pop up mainly because we have no idea how to phrase what we are looking for, or that we searched for websites in the wrong way, but still, verdammt... As such, in my eyes, the google, yahoo, msn and other search engines aren't too bad, everything considered, but I guess that no matter how good anything is, human error will screw things up one way or other. Murphy was an Optimist, after all...
Forums
Hmm...forums...never really got into them a lot. But then again, what most people talk about in forums are of little interest or concern to me, so I tend to ignore them. The websites that I rarely, if ever, contribute to are hackforums.net, hardwarezone.com, and minitokyo.net.
However, I'll admit that interacting with people using forums are quite...intriguing, if you must. The people sometimes offer different perspectives on things, offer information and ideas we would usually never think of (e.g. making a smoke bomb with home-acquired materials, or even plastics explosives *don't try these at home...*)
I would agree that discussion forums, if they're related to what we're working on (which they rarely are, in my opinion...) will be helpful towards our research... Trying to find the relevant forums are, however, a very different thing altogether.
Do I feel anxious about talking to others you do not know? Usually, yes, but not on the Internet. As they say, the Internet is the home of the anonymous. Unfortunately, This anonymity is a double-edged sword.
When we are anonymous, our identities are protected, and we can say or do things that we would normally not do in our everyday lives. However, it is precisely because our identities are protected, that we might do things that might be disapproved of, criminal, even.
Of course, the identities of those who do such things can usually be traced through the Internet, but it would take investigators time to do so, and an experienced hacker may be able to virtually erase his existence from the net, making it impossible to find him.
Citations and Bibliographies
Citation? Bibliography? Why are they important? I'm not too sure of that myself, other than the primary use of avoiding being accused of plagiarism. If I were to take a guess, though, it would be so that other people who may stumble across your work, and are interested in it, would have the original sources from which you compiled your work from to refer back to.
Other than that, I don't really have much of an idea on why citations and bibliographies are important. Well, that's it today, I guess. Do these blog thingies have spell and grammar checkers, anyway? Oh wait...there it is...
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