A healthy mix of writing that makes you think and writing that helps you do.
"Search starts with the Web. It's made up of over 30 trillion individual pages, and it's constantly growing..."
"Search competency is a form of literacy, like learning a language or subject. Like any literacy, it requires having discrete skills as well as accumulating experience in how and when to use them. But this kind of intuition can’t be taught in a day or even in a unit – it has to be built up through exercise and with the guidance of instructors while students take on researching challenges."
"The funny thing is, none of this is Google’s fault. Wikipedia is a perfect source of information provided you understand how sources and information work. Same with Google. In and of itself, it’s literally a perfect, whole thing that does exactly what it’s supposed to do.
It’s technology abuse that introduces problems."
Jakob Nielsen, Nielsen Norman Group | April 2011
"Today, many users are so reliant on search that it's undermining their problem-solving abilities. Ironically, the better search gets, the more dangerous it gets as people increasingly assume that whatever the search engine coughs up must be the answer."
Note: this article was written for an audience of website designers and usability experts, who like to pretend the word "incompetent" isn't insulting.
"Based on how Google ranks search results, typing in a question will be more likely to bring back pages with a question for a title. In many of our everyday searches this is an easy way to find question and answer sites when we want them, but Q&A sites are not necessarily authoritative sources for school work. So I have students write down their questions and teach them how to mark them up to create queries, the first step being to identify the significant words."
Z. Smith Reynolds Library
"It is important that any website you use for research is accurate. Of course, if you are just learning about a topic, you might not have the subject expertise to know if the information is true. Even if you don't know much about the topic, knowing the authors name and background give you some indication if the information is accurate. Knowing the reason for the website's existence also can give you insight. For example, if the website is designed to persuade, the content might be biased."