Google Web Search Lessons

Why teach search?
and how to do it effectively

General tips

• Everything is searchable.

• Nothing stays constant on the web.

• Control + F is very useful.

• Advanced Search and Preferences are available with each
product.

• RSS is also available.

• Just about every product has a team blog.

http://www.google.com/educators/p_websearch.html

Start Your Engines Which Link Do I Follow? Believe It or Not?

The Keys to Search City Your Search Tool Box Advanced Search Squad

Quick Finds Advanced Advantage Search Summit

Google Web Search Lesson

Topic: Understanding Search

Start your
Engines

Let's start with
some definitions

Search Engine

Can you search for a definition of
what a Search Engine is?

Let's start with
some definitions

Browser

Website
Query

URL
discussion

Let's start with
some definitions

URL

http://www.nationalgeographic.com

.gov
.mil
Domain site Top level .uk
.fr
domains .de
.com
.org
.biz

Visible Web
Deep Web

discussion

Topic: Understanding Search What do your search
results say?

Can you assign a description to each numeral
above?

Topic: Understanding Search What do your search
results say?

1. The title: The first line of any search result is the title of the webpage.
2. The snippet: A description of or an excerpt from the webpage.
3. The URL: The webpage's address.
4. Cached link: A link to an earlier version of this page. Click here if the page
you wanted isn't available.

Searching with Google

Which Link
Should I Follow?

Which link should I follow?

Intermediate

Topic: Understanding Search What link should I
follow?

What do these concepts and search features mean?
How can they help you decide which link to follow?

• Page rank and index

• Statistics bar

• Dictionary definitions

• Search results

• Sponsored Links

discussion

follow?

Organic (or natural) search Sponsored Links
results (Advertising)

follow?

What do these search features mean?
How can they help you decide which link to follow?

• Search Results

• Sponsored Links

discussion

Topic: Understanding Search What do these
links tell us?
Prediction

Before you click on the search result link, make an
initial judgment:

How do I know if this information source valid?

• Check the URL
• Read the domain
• Analysis of the snippet
• Popularity (statistics)
• Other - related links, sponsored links etc

discussion


Validate the
Authority


Pair share brainstorm ideas:

How do you decide if
something is true?

discussion


Credibility = trustworthiness + expertise

Tips
• Get multiple answers.
• Always check your
Assessing Credibility
answers.

What is the diameter of the earth?

Tip
Topic: Understanding Search Get multiple answers.

Search with obvious terms: [ diameter of the earth ]
But Get multiple answers by looking at different sites.

Depending on which one you choose, you’ll get somewhat
different answers!
• Site #1: 7,926.41 miles
• Site #2: 12,756 km
• Site #3: 12,756.3 km
• Site #4: 7,900 miles
What are some possible reasons for the differences?
Practice

► Credibility
• We all want to teach it… but how?

• Credibility = trustworthiness + expertise
o Oh yeah… it’s also socially contextualized: What’s
credible to you might not be credible to another social
group.

• A large part of learning how to judge as credible is…
o What does your social group recognize as credible?
A large part of this is name recognition.
 NYTimes v. Fox v. CNN…
 Folger Shakespeare Library v. Renaissance Pleasure Faire v.
LARPers. …

How else do you judge
Topic: Understanding Search the credibility of
Assessing Credibility a web page?

Strategies to determine trustworthy and expertise:

• The URL (Is it from a place you’ve heard of before?)
• Type of page (Is it someone’s personal page? e.g., Geocities, aol.com)
• Type of domain (.eduis more believable than many others)
• Where (Is it hosted in another country? e.g., .ru.cn.izetc.)
• Check the “About” section. (Is the web page affiliated with a place you’ve
heard?)
• Is there a date and author?
• Look up the author in Google (usually need to use double quotes)
• Why was the page put on the web? (to inform?, to convince? who's point
of view?)

* Tips by Daniel M. Russell, Google Search Quality Team

Tip
Always check your
answers
How can you tell if something is credible?
Believe it or not

Use Google search to complete the following test on one or
more of your search results pages about the diameter of the
earth:

Check links pointing TO the page:
use: [ link: <URL> ], e.g [ link:www.ufos-alien.uk ]

Check the page and site on Alexa.com
use: www.alexa.com – look on the “Site overview” and “Traffic”

Check links pointing OUT from the page:
• use: www.linkvendor.com/seo-tools/outbound-links.html

Believe it or not?
Did NASA fake the moon landing?

Advanced


Conduct the search below (use those exact terms):

Practice

Example:
• [ lunar landing hoax ]

• Click on first result:
www.ufosaliens.co.uk/cosmicapollo.html

Name recognition is
Topic: Understanding Search important to assessing
credibility

If you know something about the
authors is it more believeable?

Heuristics to check credibility

• Look at the contact info for website
o usually on the home page, not a deep linked page

• Look at ads that run on the site
o what do they tell you about the content / operator?

• Use the link operator:
[ link:www.ufos-aliens.co.uk ]
 to see what other web sites link to this site

Find out who owns the site…
• [ whois ufos-aliens.co.uk ] – handy Google Onebox
• www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp
• www.internic.net/ -- look under “Whois Search
Results”

Report for:
ufos-aliens.co.uk

Looking for plagarism
• This is a perfect use of double quote:
o Look for a “low probability phrase or sentence”
o That is, something that seems unique and NOT likely to
be a common phrase that would occur naturally

• Note that many low-quality sites completely copy
content
o Strategy: Look for duplicated content

• Note that many times an inaccurate story will be
duplicated from news-story to news-story.
(Also true for low-quality email messages that spread rumors.)

• Example from:
http://www.indiana.edu/~istd/examples.html

Common
phrase

Uncommon
phrase

[ “first technology was the primitive
modes” ]

Search Techniques
& Strategies

Topic: Search Techniques

Keyword
Searching

What is a
Topic: Search Techniques Web search?

Topic: Search Techniques How can I find what
I'm looking for?

Keyword search...

Try keywords
in search box

discussion

Tips for selecting
keywords

Think how the

1
Describe what you

2
page you are
need with as few
looking for will
terms as possible.
be written.

Use the words

3
that are most Choose

4
likely to appear descriptive
on the page. words.

How to find those
Topic: Search Techniques perfect "keys"

1. What is it I’m looking for? (think about common keywords)
2. How would someone else talk about it? (what words would they use? how
would THEY describe it?)
3. Which of those terms would be most common?
4. Which of those terms would be very specialized to this topic?
5. What kind of thing would make me happy? (do I want a single web page, a
definition, a collection, an image.... or …?)

You try it!

Keyword Search
Topic: Search Techniques Challenge

Select one class topic_____________________

In teams, brainstorm 5 keywords for topic

Quickly place keywords into a Google Form (or write down)

Compare choices of keywords between the teams

Vote for the best

Now try them in the search box.

Which keywords
Topic: Search Techniques produced the best
results?

? ?
? ?


Your Search
Toolbox

Your Search Toolbox

Intermediate

How should I search?

Search tools: What matters / What doesn't matter

1.Brainstorm keywords
2.Prioritize keywords to use first
3.Reorder keywords / add more keywords
4.Try capitalization variations and punctuation

discussion

What if I don't know much
Topic: Search Techniques about my topic?

Search tools: Spell check and Did you mean?

discussion

Try some variations to
Topic: Search Techniques your search terms

Search tools: Synonyms and the "~" tilde operator

Try this first: [car engine]

Then try: [~car engine]

discussion

Excluding words from a
Topic: Search Techniques search

salsa recipe -tomatoes

Don't forget: No
space between the
minus and the
word to exclude! discussion

Seeing results only for an
Topic: Search Techniques exact phrase

"XXX YYY ZZZ"

Note: Quotations are
rarely needed! Used them
only when absolutely
necessary.

Topic: Universal Search

The
Advanced

Search
Squad

Advanced Search Squad

Advanced

What different types of
Topic: Universal Search information do you see in
these search results?

Can you see results?
Topic: Universal Search

What media do you see in
Topic: Universal Search these search results?

discussion

What are the benefits of
blending different kinds of
results in search results?

Topic: Basic Search Features

Fill in the blanks

http://bit.ly/15second

Topic: Advanced Search Features

Search Advantage

Search Advantage

Intermediate

Topic: Advanced Search Operators Numeric Range

North Face jackets $35..$200

discussion

Topic: Advanced Search Features Numeric Range

U.S Presidents 1900..1950

discussion

Topic: Advanced Search Features Related

related:kids.nationalgeographic.com

discussion

related:kids.nationalgeographic.com

Summary

• exclusion: use minus symbol without a space in front of a
search term, e.g salsa -dance
• numeric range: use two numeric parameters with two dots
in between, e.g. nobel peace prize winners 1980..2009
• related: use related: plus the url of a web site, e.g
related:nytimes.com

Topic: Advanced Search

The
Search
Summit

Using the Advanced
Topic: Advanced Search Search Page

discussion

More Operators
Topic: Advanced Search

Try the following searches on Google ...

inurl:nanotechnology

intitle:nanotechnology

What do the inurl and intitle operators do?

Using Google's
Topic: Advanced Search Search Options
Panel

What happens if you click on
"Show Options" ?

Using Google's
Topic: Advanced Search Search Options
Panel

Image Swirl

http://image-swirl.googlelabs.com/

News: Personalized or Standard

News Timeline

http://newstimeline.googlelabs.com/

Trends

http://www.google.com/trends

Book Search

http://books.google.com/

Custom

http://www.google.com/cse/

The REAL takeaway..
• Have a research stance…
• Make research be a part of everything you do

• Teach this attitude to your students

• Plan on learning new skills
o Nothing stays constant on the web
o Search engines continually improving
o New search tools / new
o Get an Alert for the Official Google Blog
(easiest way to stay up-to-date on our not-very-well advertised
features)

Original Materials
Developed by . . .
Cheryl Davis, Kathleen Ferenz
Dan Russell, and Lucy Gray

Google Web Search Lessons

Recommandé

Recommandé

Contenu connexe

Tendances

Tendances (20)

Similaire à Google Web Search Lessons

Similaire à Google Web Search Lessons (20)

Plus de Honor Moorman

Plus de Honor Moorman (20)

Dernier

Dernier (20)

Google Web Search Lessons

Notes de l'éditeur