This is an article in two parts, the first explains search engines and searching, while the second explains actual tips about searching, skip to the second part if you don’t want to read about search engines and searching.

Part 1: Understanding the Google Algorithm and computer searching

The internet is a big place.  What amasses in the petabytes (1 petabyte = 1,048,576 Gigabytes; possibly even larger) of information, culminates one of the largest data archives in the known universe, and best yet, it’s actively archived by search engines such as Google, Microsoft Live, and Yahoo.  However, in it’s initial days, search engines were loaded down with poor information and bad sorting algorithms.  Fortunately, this is no longer the case.  Ever since Google came into being, the original revolutionary search engine sorting algorithm, pretty much everyone has updated their algorithms to be more efficient, and thus more useful.

However, despite this, the ever growing Google index can be difficult to navigate and find useful information.  With literally trillions of entries (link) in the index, searching through it to find anything from a niche topic to the latest big news article can be an absolute nightmare (and just imagine what it’s like to INDEX all of this).

First however, you need to understand a little about searching.

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Ok so this is probably going to be the first in a series I do on utilizing the internet as a modern student, making use of all the different tools we have in modern times to better ourselves.

What prompted this is I was never taught Algebra properly (and never really listened either to be bluntly honest), so I’m terrible with Algebra.  However, if you’ve read my About page, you know I’m also an engineer.  Math is essential to my degree, including a bunch of Calculus courses.  I happen to be in Calculus 2 (or Integral Calculus, it differs at different colleges) and I’m having a time with all the Algebra tricks required to solve a bunch of these equations.

In the old days I could go for tutoring, get a lot of help from my professor, or review through the book.

But this is the Information Age, what can I do now that doesn’t inconvenience the tutor (they have lots of other students to help out), inconvenience my professor (he’s busy enough as it is), or make me want to pull my hair out in a generally ineffective manner?

If you’re not familiar, a lot of colleges have been putting some of their courses online.  MIT, U/C Berkeley, Stanford, etc.  All of these and many more have been initiating free courses (called courseware) to be downloaded and viewed on demand to whoever.

So, as bad as a taste that this leaves in my mouth, I launched iTunes and went to the "iTunes U" category in the iTunes store, then scrolled down to mathematics and found a College Algebra course with ~35 lectures for download from Florida Community College at Jacksonville.  Perfect.

I also found differential and integral calculus courses from MIT which will be great for review throughout the days.  Plus I can have the MIT training in Calculus and other courses.  It may be beneficial in an interview to say "yeah I took  the course at my own college but I also took MIT’s course via their OpenCourseware service, so I have both my college’s training and MIT’s training"

So time to begin the review, aka totally retaking the course but I can’t think of a much better way to do it.