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I need help finding a certificate or associates degree from unknown sub major?

I would like to get a certificate or associates degree for creating a business for an online multi search engine. The type of searches you can conduct are public records, proprietary records, detailed business records including companies that are dissolved a long time ago, web search, image search, document search, video search, etc. The only problem I have is not knowing the type of career description it's a computer science major but dont know the sub major and can't find any online certification for the convenience.

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Jimil’s Answer

Hi Edwin. I am very knowledgeable in your search engine idea. In order to scrape data from various sites, you need to get into web automation. Web automation tools such as selenium, playwright and puppeteer, allow you to use python, javascript, C#, or Java to program automated web browser functions in order to gather the data for a search engine. You can learn the languages I mentioned in school, but they won't teach you selenium, playwright, or puppeteer. You have to learn these on your own, like I did, through youtube videos, codecademy, udemy, or other online coding courses that may not give you college credit. I'm not sure if Selenium, Playwright, or Puppeteer have certifications, but I highly doubt that any college has a submajor for this particular technology. Computer science as a whole should teach you a variety of languages. at a minimum you would need to know playwright, javascript, html, and css to make your idea happen. Everything except playwright, you can learn in college.

The specific field you're describing sounds like it could fall under the umbrella of "information science" or "information management." Information science is a interdisciplinary field that deals with the study of the collection, storage, retrieval, dissemination, and use of information. It encompasses a wide range of topics, including knowledge management, data science, library science, and more.

Here are a few potential options for certification or associate degree programs that may be related to creating a business for an online multi search engine:

Data Science: This field deals with the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data, and often involves using machine learning and statistical techniques to extract insights from data. Data Science associate degree or certification programs will cover topics like data mining, data visualization, and statistics.

Information Technology: IT associate degree or certification programs cover a wide range of topics related to technology and information management. They often include classes on programming, web development, database management, and cybersecurity.

Library and Information Science: Library and information science associate degree or certification programs focus on the management of information resources in a variety of settings, including libraries, archives, museums, and information centers. They may include coursework in cataloging, information architecture, and metadata management.

Computer Science: You can also consider studying computer science which is a broad field that covers various areas like software development, algorithms, data structures, and more. Even you don't find a certification or associate degree specifically tailored to your interest, studying computer science will give you a good foundation to understand the field and make you ready to work in most related field.

Keep in mind that I'm listing some examples and there might be other fields and careers that you could be interested in. I would recommend checking with universities or community colleges in your area to see if they have any relevant programs, or searching for online certification or associate degree programs that align with your specific interests.
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William’s Answer

Edwin,
You may study Computer Science or Computing or Information Technology and specialize in Website Development (Web Applications Development), Data Science and Artificial Intelligence.
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Drew’s Answer

Degree/Majors from a couple folks who know the business:

Larry Page was an honors student at the University of Michigan, where he also participated in the university’s solar car team, reflecting another lifelong interest: sustainable transportation technology. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering, he began graduate studies in computer science at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. It was there that he first undertook the project of analyzing patterns of linkage among different sites on the World Wide Web.

Sergey Brin, a native of Moscow, received a bachelor of science degree with honors in mathematics and computer science from the University of Maryland at College Park. He is currently on leave from the Ph.D. program in computer science at Stanford University, where he received his master's degree.

Sergey's research interests include search engines, information extraction from unstructured sources, and data mining of large text collections and scientific data. He has published more than a dozen academic papers, including Extracting Patterns and Relations from the World Wide Web; Dynamic Data Mining: A New Architecture for Data with High Dimensionality, which he published with Larry Page; Scalable Techniques for Mining Casual Structures; Dynamic Itemset Counting and Implication Rules for Market Basket Data; and Beyond Market Baskets: Generalizing Association Rules to Correlations.

Thank you comment icon Hey Drew, this is interesting info but doesn't connect back to the question. Are you saying a good starting point would be for this student to look into the majors these computer science wizards teach? Gurpreet Lally, Admin
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John’s Answer

Hi Edwin,

Let me see if I can tackle this one for you. There is no "search" sub major as you have correctly found out. So, let's discuss for a minute the problem you are trying to solve and see what related fields might fit.

Public records - much of the USA has public records digitized. They will be in the form of Data in databases, pictures, perhaps video and sound. Outside the USA it's hit or miss as far as if the records are digitized or online depending on the technical maturity of the nation. Different countries will care about different information so not all data will be available in all places. Further how business is conducted in different countries may create different types of data that simple don't exist elsewhere. Finally, there will be a language barrier that next gen search will have to overcome.

The number of problems in next gen search are astounding.
1.) Privacy laws in every country will be different. What data you are allowed to access and how you are allowed to use it is critical. This suggests you might want to explore International Law for example. While that's probably not a sub major you get the picture.
2.) Language - Let's say you wanted to search on all records pertaining to COWS. (Fill in COWS with anything.) Your search needs to first translate COWS into every known language or have data available already translated into a common language which then will be translated to the user's language then search every data source for at least the most logical language choice in that database. But most likely each data source will take advantage of a number of languages (for example Spanish is very common in the USA, French in Canada etc.) So, you might want to study how computers handle human languages. Is Linguistics a sub major?
3.) For now, data is mostly limited to how a human might interact with it. That is, we need to be able to See it, Hear it, Feel it, Smell it or Taste it. For the moment most public record data is either words or 2d images. Many of those 2d images are pictures of words. In the future, you can expect full motion video, audio and 3D to come on to the scene. I'm not sure how soon smellovision will happen. But you never know! But clearly computers will need understand video, audio and 3D. OCR Optical Character Recognition is the group of technologies computers use to translate pictures of words into words so that they can be searched. How does one translate a 3D rendering of the Statue of Liberty into something that is searchable? What words would you even use to search? Would you even use words? Or could you draw a quick picture? Or could you intro duce a video clip and ask Google to search on that clip? Today for the most part we type words into a search bar. But next gen search will have many more options. The sub major that comes to mind in this area used to be call computer vision. Now a days I think Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are similar enough. The trick is the computer needs to "understand" What everything is that it has access to, the context of the data and the context of the search inquiry. Next gen search will be more about solving specific problems whose techniques will be applied in random ways to result in unexpected and sometimes serendipitous ways.
4.) Imagine if you will all data of all types being simultaneously available. We'll never get to that but think about a really big, hugely big data set. That data includes all formats, video, audio, Microsoft Word files, Google Docs, DNA strands, still images, GIFs. 3D, 2D, Movies, Songs, anything you can think of it's in there. Then you speak to your phone a paragraph, or have your phone watch your professor give a lecture. The paragraph is the search query. Or the lecture is the search query. The mesh will need to understand what you want to get back from the query. It then will need to gather all the data it has pertaining to the query from the nearly infinite data available. Then since we mere humans can possibility consume all that, the mesh will need to be smart enough to reduce the content to something even a human can understand. Furthermore, as we interact with the query result, how we interact with it will further enhance the definition of the query itself thus changing the result on the fly in real time. Now imagen 10 billion people around the world making similar queries of the same mesh at the same time. The amount of computing power that would be required right now might fill the moon. I say all that to suggest next gen computing like Quantum Computing might be a good sub major. We're going to need it.
5.) Finally, security. You can't get enough of it. If you want to guarantee yourself a job after college Computer Science with a sub major in security is a winner. Can't go wrong.

I wrote a lot of crazy or maybe 1/2 crazy stuff above. If you want a simple answer, I think your best bet for a sub major in computer science is AI and Quantum Computing with a heavy dose of Security. In fact, just get an MS degree. Then decide if you want a PhD or if you want to start making money.

Wishing you lots of working hard and some working smart,

-John

John recommends the following next steps:

Read everything Isaac Azimov has written
Read everything Orson Scott Card has written
Really figure out what your goals for your career are: Money, Lifestyle, Work Life Balance, Prestige etc.
Do computer science for the fun of it. And not because it was assigned in class. If it's not fun take a different class!
Find a problem you'd like to solve. Build a degree around that.
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