Michelle MuleQuentin GauseNicole PisackInformation Structure: Final5/3/14Information SearchThe readings for the topic, Information Search, all explore one central idea, and that is how and why we search for information . The third chapter of Lester and Koehler's Foundations of Information Studies explores the concept of our need to know the unknown. And even more so, the need to reduce our uncertainty about a topic. It's a human instinct to want to know something we don't know much about, but only recently have we had complete and immediate access to all this information. The new technology we have access to provides us with endless amounts of information and the opportunity to find information in places outside of the classroom. Information seeking is defined as “a process in which the actor's understanding of his or her tasks or problems, information needs, relevance criteria, and available information space evolve” (Lester & Koehler, 2007, p. 40 ). This evolution becomes the absolute need to know what we want and what type of information we need. Obviously everyone has needs and everything we do we do because we want to satisfy those basic needs. Thomas D. Wilson “suggests that information seeking might be described as part of a human stress/coping response, implying that we seek information to help cope with situations in which our needs are not being met” (Lester & Koehler, 2007, p. 41). Since this may be true, we want to satisfy our needs to decrease our stress levels, but not everyone's needs are the same. This leads to different ways to satisfy our information needs, for example entertainment as information. As humans, we are all different in the things we care about or c...... middle of paper ...... is a company that collects information from its users and sells it to advertisers. Gleick writes that “Google's business is not search but advertising. More than 96% of its $29 billion in revenue last year came directly from advertising, and most of the rest came from advertising-related services. Google earns more from advertising than all national newspapers combined." Google has been successful with this method of simply advertising and selling ad space. But the reason companies turn to them is because of their search engine and their special algorithm called PageRank, "it's a probability distribution and the calculation is recursive, the ranking of each page depends on the ranking of the pages" . This development was created by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. This algorithm has made them billions of dollars and will continue to improve and become more efficient.