EduTechie.com

01 Feb, 2007

Are Webpages Documents?

Posted by: Jeff VanDrimmelen In: Instructional Technology

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So I was doing a search query today on Google and it didn’t find anything. That happens when you do very specific searches. Something caught my attention though. The “didn’t find anything” page said:

Your search ‘ “[search terms]” – did not match any documents.

I found it very interesting that Google decided to use the term ‘documents.’ When I search the web I usually think of searching for web pages, even though I do search for specific documents every once in a while.

My teachers always taught me that the information on the internet was unreliable. They NEVER described anything you found on the internet as a document. It was always a webpage, which carried a distinctly negative connotation to it. This may be because when I was going to school when the internet was first coming online, but even now teachers caution against citing anything on the internet as a source.

Do you think Google’s use of the word ‘document’ was on purpose? Is Google trying to redefine the definition of webpages or am I just reading too much into this? :-) In reality a webpage is a document… but document sounds so much better to me…

1 Response to "Are Webpages Documents?"

1 | Jeff VanDrimmelen

February 1st, 2007 at 7:57 pm

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Tonight Google Operating System posted an interesting article about doing what’s important.  At the end of that article they said:

Google hopes to improve the quality of the search results, because books contain much valuable information than web sites. “Google has become known for providing access to all of the world’s knowledge, and if we provide access to books we are going to get much higher-quality and much more reliable information.

I’m not sure how this fits in, but it seems to be important when thinking about ‘documents.’  Google realizes, perhaps, that the internet just needs to contain all the information.  They use the term ‘documents’ do describe it all.  Good/Bad, useful/useless, etc. etc.