5 great Google search tips

The good news about Google search?

It searches something like 97 bazillion web sites. Whatever you’re looking for is in there somewhere.

The bad news about Google search?

It searches something like 97 bazillion web sites. Whatever you’re looking for is in there somewhere.

Using Google can be a powerful tool but you and your students often spend way too much time trying to find what you’re looking for. The good news is that Google provides a variety of built-in search strategies that can assist in your search. These strategies deliver quality results while saving you time.

InstaGrok – Search tool extraordinaire

I ran across InstaGrok last week and fell in love.

InstaGrok is an “intelligent web search engine” designed to help you find educational content. It’s gonna help find online materials on most educational topics and at different knowledge levels.

A ton of educational materials is scattered across the web, yet they are often difficult to find using general-purpose search engines like Google – there’s just too much stuff. A simple Google search of Battle of Gettysburg, for example, returns over 2,750,000 hits.

And because the stuff you find can vary widely in scope, style and intended audience, it is not easy to measure the suitability of the results, to easily assess whether the material is basic or advanced, or to know which concepts are important to know, especially on an unfamiliar topic.

instaGrok helps learners:
* quickly visualize the conceptual space of a topic
* visualize concepts and their relationships
* select the difficulty level of concepts/materials
* see key facts to help them get started
* explore educational websites,videos,images
* test their knowledge with auto-generated quiz questions
* capture their research in the built-in journal

If you’ve ever used the very cool online dictionary, Visuwords, you have a sense of how InstaGrok works. I especially like the quiz questions that are automatically generated and the ability to find a variety of resources by using the sorter on the right hand side. I also appreciate the ease of the complexity slider at the top of the screen – one side is a chalkboard and the other is Albert Einstein. Simply slide from one end to other to get less or more complex information and materials.

I still like Google. But InstaGrok is going to get some work too.

Tip of the Week – 2011 Google Year in Review

Every year, Google publishes its annual Zeitgeist:

What mattered in 2011? Zeitgeist sorted billions of Google searches to capture the year’s 10 fastest-rising global queries and the rest of the spirit of 2011.

From that report, the Google folks created a short video highlighting the events of 2011 as seen through the lens of Google searches. It’s a different way and a different perspective to view the past year. It’s also a nice way for you and your kids to start a conversation about a whole range of things:

• Current events
• Bias & perspective
• Cause and effect
• Why are some events more “important” than others?
• Why did some events and people make the video and others didn’t?
• What would the video look like if it focused on just one country? On just the United States? On just your state or city?
• What would your video look like?

The cool thing is that your kids can create their own video. Using the very awesome Google Search Story Video Creator, your students can use the Google Search tool to fashion a ZeitGeist of their own.

Have fun!

(View the 2010 version here.)

Tip of the Week – Google Text Search

Everyday, I get the chance to work with a ton of smart people. A ton.

And today I had the chance to learn from my 2000 pounds of friends about Google Text Search – a tool that takes advantage of standard Google Search functions such as weather, maps and local businesses in your cell phone’s text messaging app. Ask Google questions and it will text you back the answers.

To start, it’s easiest to create a new Contact on your phone. I just put Google as first name and Text Search as last name. The mobile phone number for Google Text Search is:

466453

So whenever you want to use Google Text Search, just start typing “Google” into your text app and you’re good to go. If you want to find local businesses, type in a zip code and keyword such as:

67063 pizza

and Google will text you back all of the pizza places in the 67063 zip code area.

You can search via texting for weather, sports, translations and definitions using the standard Google search words.

So you can, or have kids, do quick searches on topics, people, events and a whole variety of things. This seems like one more way that we can use cell phones as a learning tool on the classroom. Especially in those classes that have limited access to laptops and computer labs.

There could be so much info getting sent your way that you might need to turn off that particular search. To unsubscribe to a search, text STOP to 466453.

My 2000 pounds of friends spent much of the late morning brainstorming ways to use Google Text Search. But I’m curious what others are thinking. How would you use Google Text Search?

Google Search tools that you may have never heard of

Google.

Yes. It’s a noun. But more and more often, we use the word as a verb.

The problem? We really don’t know how to use it very well. A recent study claims that

students might have grown up with the language of the information age, but they do not necessarily know the grammar.

They can use Google but they seldom find the best results because they fail to understand how to structure their searches. And . . . us old people? Not much better.

So a few tips:

1. Use the advanced search feature at Google.com. Find the Advanced Search options by clicking the Gear symbol in the very top right hand corner of the Google.com screen.

After clicking Advanced Search, you’ll find a screen that lets you be very specific about what you are looking for. You and your kids need to start using this screen to add specific phrases, eliminate keywords that might appear in the results that you don’t want, search by date, search for a specific file type like PowerPoint or PDF, search in a specific domain such as CNN.com and in a specific areas of a web site such as the title.

2. And once you get your results back, be sure to use the filters and tools along the left-hand side of the screen. A default Google search looks for everything but you can also narrow the search to images, videos, books, blogs, places and discussions.

You can also use a variety of tools to filter your results even further. I especially like the Sites with Images, Timeline, Dictionary and Reading Level. This one is especially helpful as you differentiate your instruction. You and students need to also take advantage of the Time filter, allowing you to be very specific about the age of your results.

3. Want to search with your voice rather than typing into a search box? Try Voice Search. Right now it works just with the Google Chrome browser but once you get used to it, it can save some serious time.

4. The Google Image search has similar filters to the left. Search by file size, type of image and time.

5. Search for images with an actual image rather by text. This allows you to search Google’s database by inserting a photo of the battle of Gettysburg, for example, and getting results based on that image. While at the Google Images search page, click the camera icon within the search box. You’ll can find information about the photographer, data about the image, online sites that incorporate that image and links to other relevant information. This new search works with landmarks, pieces of art, logos and more.

6. Need some review? How about a great big classroom poster with tons of search tips? Google’s got ‘em.