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Educational Psychology 110: Planning Your Major and Career

Activities and resources to support Charting Your Path to Success: Researching Your Major and Career Goals

Step 4: Explore Career Information on Google

  1. Enter your search strategy from Step 3 into Google
  2. Skim the first two pages of results. Click on anything that looks interesting to you!
  3. In 2-4 sentences, write about 1-2 search results that you looked at and how you might use the information you found for this class – think about what information you trust, who is providing the information, and where the information is published.  
  4. Paste links to the articles that you looked at: 

Below are videos to help you evaluate the information that you find online through search engines like Google. 
 

This 2 minute video breaks down key clues to evaluate on a Google result page.

This 2 minute video breaks down how to find out more about a particular website to determine if you want to use in your research process. 

Why Search Algorithms Matter

Algorithms are complex sets of instructions typically used by computers to execute a task or solve a problem, and they play a big role in the way we experience and view the world.

Social media platforms, artificial intelligence, and search engines like Google all rely on algorithms to find, organize, and display content based on data these services collect on their users.

In the video ‘Algorithms of Oppression’ Noble talks about how we perceive search results as “Objective/Fair/ Neutral," but, in reality there are many algorithmic controls that shape the results we see.

We know that Google uses a search algorithm to anticipate what you want to find. Is this always a helpful feature? How might "personalized" results influence how we see ourselves or our future careers?