Journal Entry #6

After viewing one of the episodes on BBc's Click, i found out something about search engines. Search engines work by finding websites on the web and listing them in order of how many times the word appears and the number of visits to the site. The point of the article is how people could easily manipulate their sites to have a different outcome appear on a search engine such as Google or Yahoo. Bloggers would create links on their sites to a word that when typed in on a search engine, the website they linked to would appear. This is called a "link bomb". Search Engine websites say that they are fine with this as long as the other links help people find what they are looking for. One other big example that you could relate to this is the growing website "Wikipedia". Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that could be manipulated by anyone. Wikipedia is an online resource for many people and since so many people use it, it would be proper for it to contain right information. In my opinion, I believe that doing these types of things just for spite is wrong. When I'm doing research on something or someone, I expect that the internet search engines would be a helpful tool, and if people continue to do these things, search information on the internet will continue to become harder and harder.