The Search for History: Research on the Web

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU8DcBF-qo4
This talk explores what data in the internet language codes can do for problems in human languages such as understanding, translation, information extraction, and inference. Peter Norvig came to Google from NASA in 2001 because he believed that that's where the data was, and he found that this search engine had a promising future. Despite the fact that technology has grown by leaps and bounds, Google remains one of the top corporations in the world. Google has gone places that were never dreamed of in the past. Norvig states that the way to make progress in Artificial Intelligence is to have more data, and the whole world is absolutely swimming in data. If you don't have good data, you won't make progress in terms of user-friendly tools, just with fancy algorithms and equations. The question at 46:00 got me very interested. The person asked if Google was going to offer any services for fighting spam.This was interesting to me because spam is still a very prevalent problem in the massive online universe. This discussion was fascinating in that it touched on a topic that I am not familiar with and therefore do not know much about. As a rather bookish person, the example involving data and probability relating back to Sherlock Holmes, while quite brief, was helpful to me because that helped the following mathematical and technological examples become more digestible and therefore more relevant.

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march06/cohen/03cohen.html
Databases such as Google seem  like common sense in today's technology-oriented word, but the Syllabus Finder tool that Daniel Cohen built followed something like this logic: a web page that contains many key words is extremely likely to be a result. The users of this specialized search engine enter key words in a search box, and the software then delivers the results. In short, if you simply ran some queries manually on the Google home page, you would not find as many syllabi as through the Syllabus Finder, nor would you see the additional information the specialized search engine provides. Articles such as this that discuss  the organization of digital materials are incredibly relevant to digital historians because search-enabled databases are central to research and compilation. This explanation is extraordinarily detailed and it is easy to get bogged down in the specifics, but at the same time, such an explanation is necessary because the internal workings are important to know for operation and use.

http://digitalhistoryhacks.blogspot.com/2006/10/searching-for-history.html
I was quite frankly baffled by this article because of all the technical language, but one thing that it does do really well is break down search terms and what those terms inform the search engine. I learned that search terms are key in developing databases that are geared towards historians and history enthusiasts. Understanding people is key to online development, which is a totally new thought. Technology is seen as something that is used by humans but does not have a human touch. However, this article demonstrates that people need to be understood in order to make any kind of use out of internet resources.