"Question Mark Made of Puzzle Pieces" by Horia Varlan

Students rely heavily on ranking–or how search tools decide the order in which to display results–to help them select sources to read. Most of us do, but the data about students comes from researchers Andrew Asher of Bucknell University and Lynda Duke of Illinois Wesleyan University.

The researchers presented the findings of their latest study and forthcoming paper on how university students do research, at the American Library Association Annual conference, and in the talk they emphasized some of their takeaways about what research skills should look like, including an overall focus on critical thinking skills and the ability to evaluate the quality of sources.

Because of the reliance on ranking, Asher and Duke argue, it’s critical for students to have some understanding of how each search tool they use makes these decisions.

To that end, here are a few resources to help understand and communicate with students about how Google ranks search results. Understanding the fundamentals of ranking will help students write better queries and make better choices about where to click.

• This video, How Search Works by Matt Cutts gives a nice overview of how items are ranked.

• Because there are changes going on to the subtler points of ranking all the time, Google makes more than 500 ranking updates in a typical year. How does that happen? You can get an overview of how such decisions are made and find out more about how Google changes its search algorithm. Take a look at this Search Quality meeting to get an insiders’ look into the process.

KEEPING UP ON CHANGES

To dig even deeper, check out the monthly posts on the Inside Search blog that cover the changes made to improve search quality. Here, you can see results to the query [site:insidesearch.blogspot.com intitle:"search quality highlights" ranking], which uses a site: operator to limit results to pages within the Inside Search blog and uses an “intitle”: operator to limit to posts that have the phrase “search quality highlights” in the title. If you click on the link, you can also note that the time filters in the left-hand side of the screen are set to show articles just from the past year, and that the articles are sorted by date so you can look at the changes in order, starting with the most recent.

Google has launched a new site called Search Education aimed at educators who want to teach online search strategies.

The site includes lesson plans geared at different levels of expertise — beginner, intermediate and advanced– as well as training videos that walk through different strategies for subjects like using Creative Commons and Google maps.

The lessons cover the following topics:

• Picking the right search terms
• Understanding search results
• Searching for evidence for research tasks
• Narrowing a search to get the best results
• Evaluating the credibility of sources

For each topic, lessons for every level of searcher goes into deep detail, offering background explanations of how search works the way it does, specific examples of search words and their results, and numerous tips. There’s also a short quiz at the end of each lesson.

The lessons are aligned with the Common Core Curriculum Standards and refer to the K-12 College and Career Readiness (CCR) Anchor Standards. According to Google, the lessons are not intended to comprise a whole research unit, but to be integrated into various units as they fit to individual educators’ needs.

Some methods are designed for starting from a specific question or exercise, while others are for created to launch from a topic.

The site also features A Google A Day lessons for daily search exercises, as well as a Lesson Plan Map that shows an overarching guide to how to use the site based on factors like level, knowledge, and skills.

Flickr: dstrelau

Dear Savvy Searcher,

“We have hit a stumper. A colleague is looking for confirmation that Maya Angelou said the following (along with where and when):

‘We all should know that diversity makes for a rich tapestry, and we must understand that all the threads of the tapestry are equal in value no matter what their color.’

We have looked widely and been unable to confirm the attribution. Everyone on the web seems to agree that she said it but no one attributes it with a citation of any sort.

Thanks! I hope y’all can help. We are stymied.”

Joy Millam
Teacher Librarian
(Reprinted with author permission from the LM_Net Archive, answer posted here)

Dear Joy,

Google Books can help with this. What’s needed is the information that appears in a citation: the author, place, and date of publication. Luckily, traditional print materials (in the form of books) often include the kind of citation information you might need and Google Books allow you to search the full text of books.

Here’s what to do:

1. Go to books.google.com
2. Search for: Maya Angelou “We all should know that diversity makes for a rich tapestry, and we must understand that all the threads of the tapestry are equal in value no matter what their color”. (Generally, I advise against typing in a whole quote. As we will see shortly, I would have done better to use fewer words, as suggested in the recent post on picking good search terms.)
3. Notice that many books simply print the quote and credit Angelou, but a few, such as Jay Phelan’s What Is Life?: A Guide to Biology w/Prep-U and Myron W. Lustig and Jolene Koester’s Intercultural Competence, agree on a source: Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now (New York: Random House Inc., 1993) 124.
4. Within Google Books, search for Wouldn’t Take Nothing “diversity makes for a rich tapestry.”

This is where the search gets tricky. Why did the book itself not come up in the original Google Books results? From experience, I know that famous quotes and other texts tend to change as they spread. As Dan Russell wrote in his SearchReSearch post about misquoting:

“Misquotation and missed attributions happen all the time. ALL the time. Even people you think would get it right–say, JFK, who was a prolific re-quoter of others and had a speech-writing staff to boot–often got the attributions wrong.”

When verifying a quote, you should not assume that you have the saying verbatim–you never know what words have been added or subtracted by someone along the way. Once again, the best practice is to pick out the key words that best define what you seek. Google ranks results, in part, by whether your search terms are close to each other, and in the same order, on a page. So, when trying to locate a specific passage, it works best to pick a phrase rather than individual words.

I look for a combination that I don’t imagine would appear any place but in the item I want to find. For example, I pick the start of the book title (Wouldn’t Take Nothing) and a unique and striking string of words from the quote (“diversity makes for a rich tapestry”). When I locate the book, click through to the profile page, and use the ‘Search in this book’ box in the left-hand column, I again enter the unique portion of the quote:
Not only do I find the saying in question, but I discover that the version I started with, while widely quoted, included an extra word: along the way, someone had added the “what” in “no matter what their color.”

As it turns out, that one little word slowed me down. Had I simply started with Maya Angelou diversity makes for a rich tapestry, I would have found her book directly. But, since I used a quote that had words she didn’t use, and put quotation marks around it to require a precise match, Maya Angelou’s book didn’t appear as a result.

Despite this misstep, end-to-end, it has taken less than two minutes to locate and verify the source of the quote.

The primary tactic I used here is called scoping. Scoping is when you limit the sources you’re searching to a set of a particular kind. Google Books, Google News, Google Images, and Google Scholar are examples of ways to scope within Google. Or, if you want primary sources on Abraham Lincoln, using a search like [site:loc.gov lincoln] to limit results to pages from the Library of Congress’ website is another type of scoping.

The power of scoping is one of the reasons Google Books is so efficient. I recommend Google Books in a wide variety of circumstances — for example:

Accessing historical gems: 

• A student studying the massive eruption of Krakatoa read The Royal Society’s 1888 research report on impact on the weather;
• Students studying early film viewed the original screenplay for The Jazz Singer; and
• A teacher who wanted a fun lesson in credibility could assign Mark Twain’s (Burlesque) Autobiography and First Romance and ask students to determine whether this was actually a true autobiography (an idea from fellow Googler librarian Kurt Groetsch).

Building understanding of more obscure, academic topics:

• Someone on Google+ asked for “…examples of the medieval motif of dancers trapped/stuck in a dance together.” I had no name for this motif by which to look it up, and no idea what the question even meant until I found scholarly sources discussing an example which then, with help from a blog post, led to more examples, also from Google Books.

Previewing books to assure they’re a good fit to a student’s reading level before requesting them from another library:

• A student interested in Rube Goldberg’s comic criticisms of the mechanical age was interested in reading Michael North’s Machine-Age Comedy, but found from the preview that the reading level was not a good match for her needs. This kept her from stalling on her homework for several days while waiting for the book to arrive from the library, and encouraged her to check out a different book, instead.

Locating or verifying books, stories, and essays:

• Uncover the original publication date of the print story, “Yes, Sweetie, Trees Can Have Purple Leaves,” by James J. Backen.

• Locate the story “Pat and the Sarpint,” which the reader recalls being in a book called Early American Folk Tales.

• Prove that a piece about a Jewish tradition around first menstruation, entitled “The Slap,” has actually been published somewhere.

• Identify a book described by the reader in these words:  “It contained Native Americans as the primary protagonists, included witchcraft, gun-running and I believe a supporting cast of hippies.”

In some of these cases, some fancy searching was involved (stay tuned for more about locating gun-runners, witches, and hippies another day). In most of these cases, however, a very straightforward Google Books search, such as typing the title of the book or story into the basic Google Books search box, uncovered the hoped-for source instantly.

The takeaway: if you want information about something that originally appeared in print, remember to try Google Books.

Have something you read once upon a time and would like to locate again? Give Google Books a try!

Have a question for The Savvy Searcher? Contact Tasha and check out the Search Education Team’s resources. Read more from The Savvy Searcher.

Flickr: Richard Morton

By Tasha Bergson-Michelson

At its heart, clever searching lies at the intersection of critical thinking, imagination, and the savvy use of technical tools. Google Search Educator Tasha Bergson-Michelson begins a series of guest posts about innovative ways to approach finding information and the problems we can solve when we bring together technology, creativity, and education.

It’s right before bedtime on Sunday night, and your child just announced that she has a report due in the morning about heroes. Excited by the Super Bowl, she wants to write about teamwork among her personal heroes, the New England Patriots. Off she goes to Google to find some inspirational pictures of the Patriots in action.

When searching for the New England Patriots, you get a variety of images–but many of them logos, or fan created photo montages on a background of the team colors. If you actually want a screen full of pictures of people playing the game, what are your options?

Looking at this first screen of results, considering what to do next, a savvy searcher asks what pictures of people actually playing football would all have in common.

One picture above immediately catches the eye: the green photo in the third row. You can tell that it is a picture of a game because of the grass on the field. In fact, most action shots in a game should have a background of turf. So, what if there was a way to tell Google to deliver only images with grassy backgrounds?

Take a look at the left-hand side of the screen. Near the bottom, there is a series of colored boxes. These are filters that allow you to find pictures of a particular color. By clicking on the green box, you can essentially tell Google to return pictures with a lot of grass:

You might be surprised at the scholarly contexts in which color filtering becomes a powerful search tactic. By itself color filtering might seem like a niche feature, but looking at a few practical applications can get your creative juices flowing as you think about problems it might solve for you.

Let’s take another example. Consider an approach one librarian discovered when working with her school’s science teachers. Run an Image Search for tesla coil and you will find:

But say that what you really want is a diagram of how a tesla coil works. What is a common factor of such diagrams? In looking carefully at the images above, you may notice that most are dark, with bright, purple arcs. Diagrams, on the other hand, tend to have mostly black writing on a white background. So, click on the white color filter:

Now, all of a sudden, your results are primarily diagrams and other technical details. Voila!

These searches are examples of a broader strategy called predictive search, in which you winnow down to your best results by anticipating their common factors. Google search allows you to specify common factors by color or terms, but also by characteristics like language, medium, or geographical or chronological features, in order to narrow down to exactly what you need. Once you see how you can think creatively about the defining characteristics of the information you want, you can become truly powerful at finding what you need.

Future posts will explore unexpected applications of everyday Google tools to solve problems even faster and more effectively.

One final example of how color filtering can improve both academic research and daily life: Have you ever read a book, and later remembered the subject and something about the cover, but not the title itself? For example, say you were wondering, “What was that book about Lewis and Clark I looked at the other day–that red one with the canoe on the cover?”

Simply search for [Lewis Clark book] in Google Images:

And filter for red images:

This method works whether you are trying to identify that full title you forgot to write down for your works cited list, or locating a gift for that special someone, when you can’t remember the title, but have just a general idea of the topic and remember that great shade of red.

Often people think of searching in words, but don’t consider the other elements that they know identify their answers. A little creativity in making use of what you know can find you more than you ever dreamed.

Give it a try! What problem can color filtering solve for you?