The Search Begins

So I have chosen to research the cost of higher education and more focused on textbooks/custom textbook and why they seem to go up every year. So for the beginning I looked at the universal search engines and basic tools that any person with an internet connection can do. After looking at google, yahoo, and duck duck go I found the only differences in duck duck go being the arrangement of the articles that were first given to me.  The first few articles were dated from over a year and a half ago and so I had to modify my search for more recent articles and I found some of the more common websites that produce news articles, being usaToday and the Atlantic.  What I found to be more surprising that there weren’t more recent articles about the issue, I assumed that around August more articles would appear so talk about the new school year.  One of the biggest things I found was in an article written by Erin Thomassen on watchdog.org, that the price of textbooks had risen by 1041% since 1977 and that it was triple the rate of inflation in the country.  This may become my focus for the project that I have in my course but I have only found sources that haven’t been peer reviewed or any other proof of authenticity. From the Ted-talk that we saw for the class I also may most likely use only duck duck go for future searches, because I prefer to sift through the information before it gets to me. Google and Yahoo are geared toward the person’s history and what most likely would want to see and, while I can see the positive of this and being able to arrive to article that are relevant to me, I would lose out on side article that I may be looking for that google or yahoo has deemed unworthy.