Chris Nolan's Presentation: "Surfin' the Net"

I found Chris Nolan's presentation on finding better information on the web very helpful. Before his presentation, I didn't have a clue how to find scholarly articles through search engines like Google and Yahoo. It was somewhat comforting to hear that Google's results aren't influenced by advertisers. Also, Google now has a feature called Google Scholar that specifically looks for scholarly articles or journals rather than popular webpages. I was also surprised by how many ways you can narrow your search in order to get limited results. I wasn't aware that the "+" and "-" signs could be used in your search. The addition sign essentially means "and," while the minus sign excludes whatever you indicate. In addition to this, his presentation taught me how to evaluate a website. Nolan's criteria in evaluating the validity of a website is useful, because I can now judge whether or not I should use a particular website as a resource in my essays. In retrospect, Chris Nolan's presentation helped me greatly. In the future, I will be able to find better information on the web more efficiently and not resort to just using popular sites as resources in my homework.