Theme 5

One issue that has come about as people's use of media has increased is that different websites are racing to become "the one." By this I mean that there are several sites that people use for various tasks, and these sites have begun heavily competing with one another to be the one that people use most prominently. The race that has attracted the most attention is that between Facebook and Google to become the leader to dominate our web activity.

Google serves as only a search engine, whereas Facebook got its start as a social network and has slowly transitioned into a hybrid of the two. The two work in completely opposite ways. Google uses algorithms to find different websites which they feel would be useful based on our search. However, Google's search method is based around how many times a site uses the words we entered into the search bar, which does not always mean relevance. Another issue that I see with the way in which Google works is that it has the possibility of becoming extremely monetized and is really a "hit or miss" on whether or not we are able to find what we are looking for, even after Google has given us options. Often times the first five or so links that appear in a Google search are websites trying to sell you things. For instance, if you do a search for baseball the first links that appear are to sites such as Sports Authority or Dick's Sporting Goods, rather than information regarding the sport itself. There is also the possibility that different companies could be paying Google to get the link to their site higher on the list of results which would gain more traffic for their website.

Even though it was not initially intended to work this way, Facebook has resulted in an extremely easy to use and helpful search engine. This is a result of the ease of access to all types of information on such sites. Instead of typing in a keyword and having hundreds of thousands or links being thrown at you, Facebook encourages you to post a question and have peers and friends offer their opinions. I believe this method works better than that of Google because there is no commercial incentive when your friends are trying to help you with your question, at least we hope not anyway! This results in a more personal search experience.