Searching Skills

HOW TO You might begin with an agreed-upon search engine and a short list of factual questions (e.g., When was President Bush born? What is the typical number of babies in a litter of leopard cubs? What is the capital of Uganda?). Which key words do the students think will get them to the answer most efficiently? Working in groups, away from the computer, they can write, critique, and revise their search strings. Online, it's time to test the results. Which team is able to locate the answer with the fewest mouse clicks? Who managed to find a search string that resulted in fewer than ten matches? The Google search engine offers a fun option that can be used for self-testing: the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button takes searchers to a single site that closely matches their search string. If the "I'm Feeling Lucky" hit answers the relevant question, students can feel proud of the keywords they chose.

The ability to search for information online is one of the most basic digital literacy skills. How do you sift through billions of pages of information in order to find the gems?

A search engine is not always where you want to start. Dr. Merle Marsh, director of special projects for Worcester Preparatory School in Berlin, Md., worries that teachers far too often send students off to "search the Internet for . . ." when they would be better off steering them to a preselected list of sites. Her favorites include Franklin Institute's Educational Hotlists and the links at Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators.

Providing such prescreened choices is important for younger students-and even for older learners when the goal is to steer them to high-quality content quickly. But, even then, search skills come into play. For example, with Yahooligans, KidsClick, or AOL@SCHOOL, the number of preselected sites is large enough that an understanding of directory structure and the use of keywords to conduct searches becomes important. And when the time does come to send students out onto the wider Web, guidance on the search process becomes essential.

There are lots of tutorials online that focus on the basics-Boolean searching, the use of keywords, and the differences between directories and standard search engines. Increasingly, you can find articles on second-generation search tools such as Vivisimo or Guidebeam and ways of searching the "Deep Web" for data contained within databases not accessed by the standard search engines. We link to some of these tutorials in the online version of this article, and others can be found at the search sites themselves.