Teach students to combine critical-thinking skills and smart-searching techniques so they can produce relevant Internet search results

Teach students to combine critical-thinking skills and smart-searching techniques so they can produce relevant Internet search results. - Exploring Computer Science Unit 1  - Human Computer Interaction, instructional days 5-7 - Page 37-39 Version 6 (Originally posted on CS Teaching Tips). 

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.

REASON:

• 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.

  • In a common online search, 33% of users click on the first link, 18% click on the second link, and other links get progressively less clicks.

Action:

• 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.
  • 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

Tutorials and videos on how to use Google Advanced Search:

• 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.

Originally posted on CS Teaching Tips