Module 1

1. About my Home page:
- a. The title of the page is "Getting Started," though the in-page title is "Welcome to Chrome." The url is https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/welcome.html
- b. I think this appeared because I just stripped away all defaults. In order to re-set the homepage in chrome, go to chrome://settings, under "On startup" select "Open the New Tab page," under "Appearance" check "Show Home button," and change the preferences accordingly. Depending on the browser, it is always a setting fairly easily located under a user-preferences menu.
- —For instance, you can adjust Home page settings in IE by clicking Tools > Internet options.
2. Yes, you can alter your viewing experience by customizing various elements.
- It's probably easiest to change the font size on a PC using the CTRL+ and CTRL- hotkeys
- In chrome, you can change the default text size. Read more here. Note how it says, "Some websites prevent the browser from changing just text size." This is true, but you can still increase the size of entire webpages, which will subsequently increase the size of the text. (Still, I think there is a way to prevent certain elements from being enlarged, though I rarely see this used outside of smartphone technology.)
- Naturally, different browsers require you to adjust these settings in different ways. A simple google search always helps if you don't know how to get started.
- You might want to increase the size of a webpage to examine its contents if, say, they aren't showing up correctly. Perhaps you wish to correct for the aspect ratio settings of the computer you're using.
- If you have some kind of visual impairment, or just very poor eyesight, you might want to adjust your browsing preferences so that text is alway larger.
3. The default search engine associated with Chrome is Google. Unless you have altered your preferences, a Google search page will appear any time you open a new tab. You can also access google by typing this url into your address bar: "https://www.google.com/".
4. Learning to make web pages:
- a. About 227,000,000 results
- —I'd estimate about half of these pertain to learning how to make web pages. Some of these want you to pay to take a course; some teach you how to use html and css. A large number discuss web hosting, though: many of these are advertisements.
- b. About 8,310 results
- —I'd estimate closer to 75 percent of these pertain to learning to make web pages. Here are some examples:
  - James Arendt's "Learning to make web pages" tutorial (This one features some useful links at the bottom of the page.)
  - Aaron Wissner's "Learning to Make Web Pages" Presentation
  - I also found several links from this course, including my homework for Professor Eyman's 375 course. It counts.
5. The number of hits are not consistent. Details:
- Although Bing returned slightly more results on the initial search than Google did, it returned hardly any results for the exact phrase. I'm not sure I would bother with it unless searching for something specific to Microsoft.
- AltaVista (Yahoo! search) returned over 3x the results on the initial search, and 50x the results for the exact phrase. Surprisingly, I think I'd find a greater proportion of the initial results useful.
- Duck Duck Go did not return a quantity for their results, and many were wikis. I would use Duck Duck Go if I didn't want a website I visited to know the search terms I used, and that I used them. Duck Duck Go makes an interesting point, which sounds valid:
  You can usually find out a lot about a person from their search history. It's sort of creepy... [that search engines could potentially] a) release it to the public or b) give it to law enforcement.
  I would also use it if I didn't want to install Tor browser and wanted to route my search through a proxy, since Duck Duck Go will apparently do this for you.
- My browser says the DNS lookup for Kartoo failed. Wikipedia says Kartoo stopped operating in 2010.
- The differences in these results can be accounted for by the way each search engine crawls, ranks, and indexes websites. First, this depends on the way the search engine's web crawler is programmed, and what the search engine does with the results after it's amassed them. Second, certain results are filtered: AltaVista, for instance, might not filter results which look like spam very strictly—this might account for the huge quantity of results. Third, it depends on how the search engine treats the end user, since almost every modern search engine attempts to personalize the results it returns. Read more here.
6. I would call Wolfram Alpha a search engine—its database is simply not the entire WWW. It looks like, while specific reference sites have been entered into their algorithm for defining and explaining search terms, the majority of their results are returned from something they call the "WolframAlpha Knowledgebase, 2016."
7. Dogpile questions:
- a. A metasite returns aggregate results from the search engines on its query list.
- b. Dogpile does not return its matches as a quantity. It organizes matches by media type (text/image/video), related ads, news, shopping, "whie pages," and by related search terms.
- c. Considering the way ads are displayed—flush with web results—I'd estimate only about 30% of these results are relevant.
8. Mamma questions:
- a. Like Dogpile, Mamma doesn't return an estimated quantity for the results it displays. Mamma breaks the matches into the following exact categories: web, news, images, video, and local.
- b. These matches seem less scattered and more relevant. Almost every returned result on the first couple pages looks helpful.
9. I'm answering these questions using Duck Duck Go:
- a. You cannot search for multimedia from the front page of this site.
- b. However, once you have typed your search term (e.g., Britney Spears), you land on an "About" page, and from there you can search for multimedia using the navigation bar at the top. The types of multimedia vary depending on the search term. Some examples include:
  - Images
  - Videos
  - News
  - About
  - Audio
  - Products
  You can add a media type alongside your main search term—e.g., Britney Spears pictures—and a bar with pictures of Britney Spears will display itself above the text results automatically.
- c. Duck Duck Go does not display this information.
- d. Ads are noticeably marked as such. Interestingly, Duck Duck Go provides statistics of the hits within certain hits, such as number of results on Amazon.com or number of likes on Facebook. It also provides the results' full url below the synopsis.
- —no warnings or disclaimers that I see
10. Please find a bit of information on the web hosting site I would most likely choose below:

	1&1 Web Hosting
Pros	—Price 0.99/month introductory rate For ~12USD, you have a year to decide whether you like their services. —Services 24/7 support E-mail Basic encryption Free domain name —Reviews Generally well-rated For instance, PCmag.com praises 1&1's uptime and customer support, as well as the low starting prices
Cons	—Price After the introductory period, the monthly rate jumps up to 6.99USD. This is sort of competitive, but charges for various services can add up. —Reviews PCmag.com does mention that you can't alter the template codes without purchasing something additional. This reduces flexibility.