The last two lessons have focused on RSS feeds and search. The lesson before these introduced the idea of a homepage and you created your own iGoogle page.

What these three things (RSS, search and homepage) have in common is that they are means by which we customise our experience of the web and find quick access to information that interests us. Societies previous to ours wrestled with the problem of handling information and we saw how the Victorians had increased the flow and amount of information circulating by creating their "version" of an internet (Lesson 3).

RSS and search both bring you stuff from the web, filtering the tremendous information flow and allowing you to focus on what you find useful. They're both means also of discovering new stuff.

This lesson focuses on making sure you are more expert than before Lessons 9 and 10 in your use of RSS and search.

Feedback from prep (Lesson 10): you watched Google Search Privacy: Personalized Search and you had to explore personalised search on your own, home machine (exploring your search history; searching within your search history; practising pausing and resuming personal search). You had to look at the setting Google provides for your personal search (here). What did you think of the usefulness of personal search history?  Could you see any problems or dangers? (There are some screen shots of the personal search and web history search at the bottom of this page. For answers to some of the questions you may have, start from this Google support page.)

1) RSS

Your teacher will give you a quick recap on Google Reader: the settings you can set within it (sorting options; renaming; folders; show all or just updated); how you manage (add, delete) subscriptions; whether you use expanded or list view (and what the >> does when you click on it):

Have you explored Trends — or used Shared Items or Starred Items?

And what's that about your Google Profile? (You can also edit yours by clicking here.)

Finally, have you checked out what you can do in your Google Reader settings? Choose 'Settings' — top right of screen:

And then explore this:

You can get RSS feeds for all sorts of interesting and useful things. Some links were suggested in Lesson 9 and here are some other ideas:

As you go through the next four years at St Paul's, you'll find that teachers will recommend sites to you and that these will have RSS feeds. The web offers a wealth of material for study, education and scholarship. Examples were given in lesson 9 ('Geography might recommend the Google Earth Blog, Classics already recommends two blogs (see here)'). Some more examples:

Lists like these are going to grow — for you, individually, as you come across sites you want to follow, and as teachers and Departments at SPS suggest and add more sites-with-feeds to you and to their intranet homepages.

2) Search

Go to the main Google search page (not google.co.uk): here. With your teacher, explore the menu options at the top left of the screen, including the drop-down 'more' menu:

Now look at the Advanced Search option (to the right of the box where you'd enter your search text): what does this allow you to do?

What's the "I'm feeling lucky" button for on the main google.com search page? (To find out, enter what is "I'm feeling lucky" in the search box and search for an answer.)

Now go back to this page (which we looked at in Lesson 10), 20 Tips for More Efficient Google Searches. You should now know about 2, 6 and 12. There's too much here for one lesson and we suggest you keep this page bookmarked (or come back to it here) for future reference. Right now, try out some of the searches you think you might find particularly useful. If you get stuck, ask. (And the answer to 'life, the universe and everything'? It's here.)

Personalised Search and Web History. Google Personalized Search (launched in 2005) uses your Search History (more information here) to refine your results based on your searching habits. (Earlier this year, Google combined your Google homepage and Personalised Search [more information here], as some of you have noticed.)

This link will take you to a page that looks similar to this (unless you're already signed in to your Google Account — in which case you'll go straight to your Web History):

The next screenshot is of this page (cited already above):

Here's a sample screenshot of a Web History page. Look at the menu items on the left.

And this is a shot of the calendar on the right of this page — one way to search your Web History (there are options for 'Older', 'Oldest', 'Newer' and 'Newest' under the detailed summary of your Web History):

Prep: be sure to have covered all the details of this page to your satisfaction. Then, look at two other sites you may find helpful: The Essentials of Google Search and Advanced Operators.

Finally, as far as we know, Google hasn't yet created RSS feeds for search results (very odd!), though the arrival of RSS for Google Alerts may (or may not) be the start of this (see here). But there are ways of doing this: for example, here. Create an RSS feed from a Google search and add this to your Google Reader.

[Bonus: why is this significant? In fact, you should really all read this excellent summary of some remarkable new developments in search.]