Sometimes finding the information you need on the Internet is challenging. You are not alone. According to the World Internet stats, there are 1.4 billion Internet users and there are over 200,000 websites registered EACH day. Heck -there are 14,672,685 individual pages on Wikipedia alone!
It
can overwhelming when you discover there are almost 60 million search
results for "John McCain" and 82 million results for "Barack Obama".
Most of us are confident when we search Google that the information we
need will be located in the first ten results - but that is not always
the case.
This past month you have been shown different ways
to search on Google - like choosing descriptive, specific words, or
adding "quotes" around multiple terms, or many of the unique Google
search terms such as: weather, define or local search.
 If you haven't used the Advanced Search page on Google - you should consider using it and teach your students to use it too.
- You don't need to remember to use "quote " or + signs when using advanced search. The key to effective searching on the
Internet is to know which search terms to use to narrow or broaden the
results you receive. Just type in your search in the section for:
- all of the words
- the exact wording or phrase
- one or more of these words
- I especially like to choose to have more than 10 results displayed. Want that to happen EVERY TIME you search? You need to go into your Global Preferences (http://www.google.com/preferences) and change the number of search results you always want displayed.
- Don' want to see results in other languages - you can change the language settings to English only.
- Searching by file types
is really helpful if you are looking, for example, a PowerPoint
presentation you saw at a conference. I heard about a PowerPoint
template to make Jeopardy games and easily found it by searching for
"Jeopardy" and choosing the "PowerPoint" file type.
- Selecting a specific date will prevent you from receiving old and out-of-date information in your results
- Another must is to turn ON the SafeSearch filter.
 A few hints about using the Image Search in Google. When your students are searching for an image using Google image search, the image results come from ANY web page that has been indexed by Google.
- Right below the image search bar is an option to choose image size.
This is very helpful to find large enough images so you don't end up
with a pixelated image by trying to enlarge a small photo.
- In the Advanced Image Search, you can customize your search by image file type, color, size and turn on the SafeSearch filter.
- Many images found in Google Image Search are copyright-protected images so please consider requiring your students to include citations for their images as well as content information. Sample: http://temple3.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/barack-obama-official-small.jpg and do not accept "Google Image Search" as a citation.
Some other sources to find copyright-free or creative commons licensing images are:
This comic explains Creative Commons licensing: http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/comics/sharingcreativeworks/sharingcreativeworks.pdf
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