Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

Google announced today the gradual release of a new search feature which will help users get more reliable results. Search results in Google will now start showing an icon which when you click on it will display more information about the source site without having to actually visit it. 

For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, here is a handy visual featuring 8 important Google Drive search tips for teachers. More specifically, you will get to learn how to: search for a document that contains a specific phrase, search for files that contain at least one of the words, find documents that do not contain a particular word, find documents owned or shared by or with a particular person, search your Drive by document type, search for documents edited before or after a specific period of time, find documents by title, and finally find items that can be opened by only certain apps.

Google is definitely one of the major entry ports for searching the net. Knowing how to conduct effective and smart search queries on Google has become an important skill for 21st century students. There is an over-abundance of information online and unfortunately a decent amount of the online knowledge is amateurish, unfiltered and at worse misinforming. This is why Googling the world wide web goes beyond randomly typing a bunch of words and waiting for the ‘feeling lucky’ button to do its work; it’s rather an informed process that takes into consideration a wide range of variables that include the choice of the words we use in our queries, the positioning of these words in a search phrase, the use of operators and symbols and many more.

Last spring I had a chance to see Dan Russell give a presentation of a new Google search tool called Dataset Search. It spent 2019 in beta. Last week it lost beta label and is now widely available to anyone who wants to use it. 

Last week Google published a new video that explains how Google Search works. The video presents an explanation of the factors that contribute to why some pages rank higher in the results page than others.