Goal:
- Students proactively build up their Internet searching skills so their searches produce the best results possible.
- Instead of indiscriminately clicking on the first few links from the millions of results produced by a simple search, students will know how to make searches that produce fewer results with higher quality links.
- Most students don’t know how to extract the most relevant information from a search that produces millions of results; they normally just type in a few keywords because they think that’s sufficient.
- Many people are passive web searchers, they often trust that the top three results in an Internet search are the best and most relevant sites People incorrectly assume the tops links represent the best possible resources.
- Teach students how to actively control their internet search to produce the best results in the first place when using Google.
- Use Search Tools to limit queries to a particular time range.
- Search Tools in Google is located under the search box next to the "more" drop-down box (at the end of the menu of result categories types).
- Example: Users looking for the most recent advances in medicine or technology can filter by date to find the most current articles.
- Another filter users can try is site, which limits search outcomes by domain type. For only education domains, use site:edu
- This is a good filter when searching for recent advances in medicine because preliminary research first takes place and is published in academia.
- Another filter users can try is site, which limits search outcomes by domain type. For only education domains, use site:edu
- Build up a search using Google’s Advanced Search, located within the settings’ gear icon, which can be found under the top right corner of an active search page.
- You can use advanced search to narrow down the results by site, domain, region, language (English, Spanish, etc), file type, and usage rights.
- Example: Put the the country in the region section of the advanced search to find out how a country reported on an event.
- Region allows users to look for resources from a specific location or country.
- In a regular search bar you can search by region by typing in the countrycode after site: (e.g., site:fr for resources coming from France)
- Teach students how to rate a website using a checklist.
- Use Search Tools to limit queries to a particular time range.
- Check out tour tip on filter bubbles to learn about what does not show up during your web searches.
- Instructions to become a Google Power User.
- Google Advanced Search - a video for journalists that has examples of site:, related:, filetype:, and using the minus(-) to refine searches.
- Three Advanced Search Tools for students - this video looks at Reading Level (this filter was dropped in May, 2015), site and filetype.
- Google Advanced Search 2014 - looks at the Search Tools, and filetypes in advanced search.