A look at the importance of teaching students how to search. Do your students (or faculty) know how to find information online? Do they have use appropriate search words, understand how results are generated, use multiple resources, to assess the information (quality and accuracy), recognize bias?
This post focuses on some of the information from the recent Pew Report that looked at "How Teens Do Research in the Digital World." The author also provides links to articles he has written on how to use Google to teach search to students in K-2, 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12.
I would also suggest teaching with search engines beyond Google. If you are concerned with tracking check out DuckDuckGo or Blekko. A great metasearch engine is Carrot2. And you can use want to compare websites side-by-side check out Slikk.
Students often forget that there are search engines beyond Google, and this post discusses a number of them.
* RefSeek is focused on academic searches. If students compare searches done in RefSeek compared to Google they will notice a difference in their results.
* Yolink (which powers the search engines on some websites including SweetSearch) is available as a browser add-on for Chrome and Safari. The post notes that this "allows students to search within the contents of a webpage, highlight important parts of a page, and send those highlights directly to a Google Doc."
* Google Scholar is also discussed.
I believe that students need to be aware that there are many great search engines and should be introduced to a variety. Others I like include Carrot2 and DuckDuckGo (which does not track you).