I appreciated Turkel's emphasis upon the importance of choosing a search engine for research. I've considered how search engines work to construct available knowledge and limit (as well as open up) access to certain sets of information considering our past searches as well as other activities we engage in on the internet. This is clearly an important process to be cognizant of as a researcher, and something we should certainly try to exercise some kind of control over, or at least thoughtfulness about.  For this reason, I recently began using Deeper Web; I like the idea of being able to determine what tag clouds I want to use in my searches, and I would like to further explore the ways in which I can customize my searches.

I use Firefox (and more recently, Chrome) as my web browser and also have an iGoogle page which feeds my Google reader. I haven't found Google reader very useful in the past, partly because I haven't figured out an efficient way to organize content and to avoid notifications about irrelevant information. Although, to be fair, this is largely because I haven't taken the time to figure this out. I recently began using Feedly, however, which I find to be a much more user-friendly application for organizing the information fed through Google reader. My web browser is customized with bookmarks (in Firefox I also use Web Developer); I cleaned up my bookmarks at the end of the semester—labeling, organizing, and deleting—and, in an attempt to determine what sites are actually useful to have bookmarked, have intentionally been using them more often.

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