Search Me!

When a search term is not a keyword

Yesterday was back to school day, and I had the pleasure of spending it with fabulous librarian Anna Koval of the Big House Library. We were discussing student research projects, and what—given a limited time—students need to learn first about using search engines.

I believe that the advanced search engine functions (site:, filetype:, and the like) are amazing tools for the thoughtful searcher, but the very first skill one has to learn is the thoughtfulness itself. Since search engines essentially match the words you enter, the number one rule for good searching is simply this: really think about what you put in, and better quality stuff will come out.

This is especially difficult when you are looking for “invisible” concepts—that is, ideas that are often expressed without the words that we use to define them. Think “statistics.” We all know what statistics are—we “know them when we see them”—but they are often recorded without actually using the word itself. Other times, the kinds of statistics we want are expressed in so many different ways it is hard to know which ones to ask our search engine for. If we are simply looking for percentage of US citizens who are homeless, just that idea can be expressed as percentage, percent, or %. Search engines like Google will look for the former two terms, but cannot even see the latter. In the same way, if one of Anna’s seniors wanted to find forecasts for childhood obesity, they would also have to contend with predictions and projections.

So, this is where visualization really comes into play. Say I want to know various public policy goals regarding childhood obesity. In past years, I would have used visualization to brainstorm a list of search terms—imaging all the different ways I had seen an idea expressed: [“childhood obesity” priorities OR goals OR targets OR seeks OR returning]. Now, however, I am working smarter. I really think about the sentences, and realize there is one commonality in the writing I see about the topic when I search Google:

"..implement our six policy priorities for reversing the childhood obesity epidemic by 2015...."

"...The goal, as set out in a report from the White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity, is to reduce childhood obesity from 20% to 5% by 2030...." 

"... The report targets a real cut of 2.5% in obesity rates by 2015 and another ..."

The common form of expression in every single sentence on the topic is actually the phrase “by 20xx.” Generally speaking, the years projected tend to run from 2015 to around 2050, meaning that the concept can be easily retrieved making use of Google’s excellent number range search (..) with the search: [“childhood obesity” “by 2015..2050”], with which I ask for pages with the phrase “childhood obesity,” and the phrase “by 2015,” or “by 2020,” or “by 2025,” and so on, up to “by 2050.”

So Anna and I started discussing how we could introduce this kind of visualization to her students. Anna introduced me to AwesomeHighlighter.com, a tool for virtually highlighting online articles, and we practiced one of my favorite skills—reading a Washington Post article on childhood obesity not just for information, but also for search terms that can be used to build enhanced searches.

There are three categories of search terms we found:

1)   1) basic terminology we would need to search for more information, such as obesity epidemic;

2)   2) sources of more authoritative information, such as the White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity; and,

3)   3)associated search terms, such as by 20xx, which appeared four different times in the article with related statistics.

Teaching how to read for terminology and authorities is relatively straightforward. Reading for associated search terms is harder, but should drive home the concept that visualization can suggest creative and productive queries. So it is a tricky, but worthwhile, task.

My goal is to experiment over the next few months, and start to build a list of associated search terms for searching news sources. I’ll be sure to share. Can you think of any more examples to help me get started?

 

Predict Before You Click

When search enginges like Google give you a list of search results, is there any way to tell which results are authoritative without going to look at them all? Educating students about how to read search engine results pages can inspire them to select quality sources. To learn more, please check out my article, recently published in American Association of School Librarians' journal, Knowledge Quest (Jan/Feb, 2010), entitled: "Predict Before You Click: Search Engine Results as the First Defense of Authority."

Youth Safety on a Living Internet

The Online Safety and Technology Working Group just finished their government-mandated report to Congress, entitled "Youth Safety on a Living Internet." I have great respect for many of the folks who wrote it, with whom I am in a group focused on at-risk behavior of youth online. 

Taking a nuanced view of fears about children's online behavior, this report “points to the growing importance of online citizenship and media-literacy education, in addition to what has come to be seen as online safety education, as solutions to youth risk online.”

You can read a blog post by one of the authors or dig into the whole report.

Page Cleaners Make Webpages More Readable

Today, I am sharing some excellent tools for un-cluttering Web pages so we can actually experience their content. Imagine reading without flashing ads or watching videos without the profanity in the viewer comments.

After all, would you be more successful reading this page?

…or this one?

 

 

So here are some of the page cleaners I have identified so far.

Please add any other tools you know of this kind in the comments below, and give feedback from your experience on the ones listed here. I am new to these resources, but cannot wait to share!

Clean pages for easy reading:

·    Readability

Readability was the first of these page cleaners I encountered, and it has worked beautifully for me, though some in the bloggosphere have had trouble with it. It takes about ten seconds to set up and drag to your bookmark bar, then you just click the bookmark any time you are on a page that needs cleaning.

·Tofu

A download for Macs. Creates pages in narrow, newspaper-like columns. Has a very easy find feature, and has a voice-activated scroll feature. 

·    TidyRead

Several bloggers seem to prefer this one to Readability, but I have had more trouble with it than the other tool. You can make an account and save favorites.

·    CleanPage 

Runs on Windows 7, Vista, XP, 2000 with Internet Explorer 6.0 and above (fee-based). Download.

Page cleaning plus:

·    Instapaper  

This page cleaner (which many people use in conjunction with Readability) allows you to create a queue of pages or articles to read later. You can access them online, but Instapaper also synchs to Kindles, iPhones, iPads, and iTouches, so you can read them anywhere, anytime.

Clean Videos for trouble-free sharing:

·   Quietube

Another drag-and-drop bookmarklet. Easy to create links (or TinyURLs) that can be e-mailed to others, so that you can share “clean” copies of the video.

·    Safeshare TV 

A website where you past in videos, or drag as a bookmarklet.

·    Silentube 

   A bookmarklet.

A huge thank you to Kelly Geigner of Teacher Tracks for introducing me to Readability in response to my post about distinguishing ads from information, and raising my awareness of this world of applications.