Still Googley After All these Years! Jeff Gentner Technology Facilitator Forest Elementary School, revised Spring 2010

History/Background Started in 1998 by Stanford doctoral dropouts - Larry Page and Sergey Brin 2006: over 200 million searches daily 2010: over 6 billion searches daily Almost 100% satisfaction

Search is the #2 Internet activity after . Google uses an automated page ranking system based on quality, popularity and how many pages link to each site. They claim that ranking cannot be bought and they tweak the system regularly. Google accounts for about 90% of all Internet searches. Advertisers on Google settle for subtle but effective exposure. NO POP-UPS!

GooglePlex Located in Mountain View, CA (Silicon Valley) Employees worldwide Grand piano in the atrium, Segway scooters and bikes for traveling between buildings, free gourmet meals prepared by a chef, free medical care, massages, volleyball courts… Sound familiar? Life at the Googleplex

At this point, Google probably knows more about YOU than YOU know about Google! Let’s check it out…..

Type in your phone number (including area code) Type in a mathematical equation, like *3-234= to use Google as a calculator Type in half a cup in teaspoons for conversion. Type in a FedEx or UPS package number to get tracking information. Type in a VIN number from a car to find out it’s year, make and model. Type in a stock name (try GOOG) to get prices, graphs, news and so on. Prices: $100 (8/2004) $567 (4/2010) Type in an area code to see a map of the area. Go to the Google homepage

What made Google good? Google presently covers more of the Internet than any other search engine. Google’s accuracy is uncanny. Search “hits” are retrieved very quickly. (present average about 2/10 of a second) Google is very easy to use. Google’s search results are useful and helpful.

Special Notations Use quotations marks for exact searches. This is particularly important when using proper names. To force Google to include a term in your search, precede the term with a + sign To force Google to excluded a term in your search, precede the term with a - sign Use an * (wildcard) to match any word in a phrase (enclosed in quotes)

Hopefully by now you are starting to see the power of Google, but how can this “power” be used in the classroom? Let’s take a look…

Google Tabs - visible and “invisible” There are several tabs above the Google search box - we will look at three of them - Web Images News

The Web tab… … is the most common tab. It is the place where most surfers begin their search. … is simple to use. Just go to the Google web site, enter your search terms in the Google search box in the middle of the page and you are off !

The Images tab… … may be one of the least complicated and most direct of Google’s features. … is also one of its most used features after search

Go to Google and select the Images tab. Type in the words New York City and click on Search (or just press the return key on your keyboard). You should get over 227,000,000 images! (NOTE: was 600,000 in 2006)

Images Beneath each picture is some information: the title of the file the size of the file in pixels and kilobytes the URL where the picture is located At the bottom of the page, you might see the Google logo spelled out with a bunch of “oooooo”s in the middle of the word. That’s to show that there are many pages of results to follow. Click Next to go to the next page of image results.

Images CAUTION When using IMAGES with students, it is best to set the PREFERENCES as follows: Go to the Google IMAGE SEARCH homepage Select PREFERENCES Look for SafeSearch Filtering Click ON the Use strict filtering button Save Preferences at the bottom of the page

Copyright A discussion of copyrights and possible violations are beyond the scope of this inservice. Each image that Google exhibits has a disclaimer the says: This image may be subject to copyright. Google suggests that you check out the source of the image to determine copyright violations. Your school Media Specialist should be able to help you with this as well.

Finding News Google is a useful tool when searching quickly for news sources. The easiest way to check major headlines is through the Google News tab, located on the main page. Click on it to go to the Google main news page.

The Headline page has top news in the following categories: Top Stories World U. S. Business Sci/Tech Sports Entertainment Health

Search News If you enter a topic in the news search box, Google searches more than 4,500 news sources and returns the most relevant news stories about your topic! You can also “ Sort by date ” to see the most recent stories on your topic.

Choose Your Words Wisely: Advice for Successful Searching! most web sites are written in natural, casual language keep it simple use your imagination

Google is also a Spellchecker! When entering terms in the Google search box, Google checks and matches your search terms with those on various Dictionary sites (Dictionary.com). If Google cannot find a match to your term, it will suggest possible alternatives.

Compare Google to other reference materials. Don’t dump your old pals - dictionary, phonebook, encyclopedia, newspaper.

File Types Google now has about 10 file formats for information on the Web, including HTML, PDF, doc, ppt, xls. HTML is the default file format since it represents the vast majority of Web information. Adobe PDF is the most popular after HTML. PDF is great when looking for lesson plans, brochures, reports or anything that you know you might want to download or print in its entirety.

Warning Know the source of the file type you are downloading! File types other than HTML - most specifically.doc files (Microsoft Word documents) - have the potential to carry viruses. Before opening or downloading a file, you can view it in HTML. As part of a search result, there is a link titled View as HTML which is a safe way to check content.

Feeling Lucky? Clicking on the I’m Feeling Lucky button on Google’s home page will take you directly to the first result for your query. Instead of showing you a list of pages, Google sends you immediately to the result that may be most relevant to your query. The I’m Feeling Lucky button can save time when you are confident the page you want is the best fit for your query, which is usually the case when you are seeking very popular pages.

Ready to Advance ? The Advanced Search Form Believe it or not, you have already experienced most of Google’s advanced features in this workshop. What the Advanced Search form allows you to do is combine some of those methods in a very convenient way. The Advanced Search form has a variety of features: the only part we’re going to use is the top half of the page, which relates to the various options already covered as we explored the standard search.

From the Google Home Page, click on “Advanced Search” Putting in the search terms How many results do you want? In what Language? File Format options How fresh are the web pages? (Date) SafeSearch filtering

Advanced Image Search Find results Size Filetypes Coloration Domains Mature Content * * WARNING: Google considers a number of factors when determining whether an image is relevant to your search request, but it is not foolproof. The best rule of thumb when using images is to restrict students to images shown on the first page of the image search results.