Web 2.0 and Search Engines

I recently have become aware of the multiple systems and websites that can be collected under the "Web 2.0" umbrella and the many factors that come into play when a user beings heavily utilizing Web 2.0 tools.  While Web 2.0 sites are usually conceived as strictly "social networking" sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest (I guess MySpace can be included too, but I'm not sure how extensively that's used anymore), there is a whole system of sharing of ideas and concepts that can be listed as a Web 2.0 feature. 

The blog, for instance, is a method for me to record my thoughts on a given topic and share them with others.  Hosts such as Blogspot, Blogger, Wordpress, and Gawker are ways that users can share content with each other in a variety of ways, be it in the form or text, pictures, video, long prose or short and sweet quips.  If you can think of a topic there's probably a blog about it, and then there's likely a whole other selection of blogs and written shared works about the things in our world you've never heard of. 

Take into account the website Reddit, in which users posts items that they have found on the Internet or items that they have produced themselves.  These posts are then voted positive or negative, with the posts receiving the most positive votes being listed as the "most popular" and being displayed on the website's front page for all users to enjoy.  In addition these posts can be sorted into a variety of "sub-Reddits" based on different topics or categories whether broad or extremely specific.  Users can then subscribe to sub-Reddits in order to instantly receive the best voted content relevant to the topics they are interested in.  My personal Reddit subscriptions include Teaching, the Yankees, Survivor, swimming, Marvel Comics, and a general category of "Books."  All of this content is sorted for me to peruse at my convenience and communicate with others in a message board style setting.

The idea of setting aside content leads me to the next topic, search engines.  I admit, I can be very lazy when I need to look something up on a specific site, but just Google the site name and the topic instead (example: Reddit Survivor; the sub-Reddit I already mentioned and one of my topics).  Search engines can be very valuable and very dangerous at the same time.  Working in a classroom, students can find anything they need online with just a simple Google search as well as ANYTHING that they don't need or don't need to see.  Even with firewalls in place at school it seems that students are able to have inappropriate content sneak through to their searches inadvertently without a simple and precise method of sorting content. 

Google is the undisputed king of search engines at this point, but I personally think it's absurd I can't just block off Google Image on some devices without blocking Google altogether or having to contact the district technology head (Hey Google, seeing as you host Blogger maybe you can help me out with this?  I'm sure you can read this post if you so choose...)  I actually made a very lengthy journal entry regarding this during my observations, that by making the Internet easier and more accessible do search engines in turn make it harder to discover (or avoid) knowledge on one's own?

As for our list of search engines, for the most part I wasn't particularly impressed or distraught by anything specific I came up with on any of them.  As a history major in undergrad I especially value the Library of Congress and the National Archives, while Google Scholar and Infotopia (powered by Google, so the same thing?) seem like reliable database as well.  My personal favorite database in Academic Search Elite, which was not included on our list but has been my go-to database research wise since high school.  I can't remember the last time I did a paper without checking on at least one article from the database, and will continue to do so beyond my graduate work.