In the first activity that I did, I read and learned about search engines and different components of them. I learned that there are these bots or web crawlers that go and fetch data from sites and that they pull information from wherever a term or word may be mentioned. How this can be useful to know for the future is that the results you may be searching may not necessarily be about the topic or thing you searched but just have mentioned it. So knowing this information you can be more specific and try using different kinds of ways to search (an activity that was done in activity 3).
In the second activity, I learned about a few different search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Ask. I learned that each search engine will give you different first results, as well as the number. For example, in Google, I noticed I got 27.6 million search results, while in Bing I got 293 million search results (Yahoo and Ask did not give a number).
In the third activity, I learned about using certain things like quotes or a minus sign to make searches more specific or to narrow down results. By using quotes, it will search what is between the quotes as a whole term, not just individual words. Using the minus sign, you can exclude certain results. You can also use parentheses around words so it knows to search that (the stuff between the parentheses) first and then the rest. Another thing that I learned was how you can put in "site:" and put a site after and it will only search for results from that domain. This can be useful so you can search specifically for what you want and not get millions of results. I think it will be helpful to know so that finding valid or credible sources for research papers, or papers in general, will be easier and less time-consuming.
The fourth activity I learned about the Wayback Machine and how you can see old sites and what sites used to look like. One of the things I noticed was that when you out in a domain, you get a chart of the history and you can go click on that and see that year's snapshots. Sometimes, what I noticed, there were orange circles, and I learned that it meant the website wasn't found or active.