Using Google to find facts:

Google (http://www.google.com) is a search engine that finds web pages on the internet according to words users have instructed Google to look for. It's the kind of thing you can use to sort through the world wide web, which stands at something like 3,000,000,000 pages.

Excercise 1: A Basic Search


Let's say you've heard that The Namibian has a website, but you don't know how to find it. You could use google to tell you where it is.

Go to google and type in

namibian

Google will go out and search the web, and then come back and tell you how many times it found the word 'Namibian' on the internet. But the top result? The Namibian Newspaper: News and Views From Namibia. (click on the blue text to visit the site, or read about the site in the paragraph that appears under the heading. ). That's the Namibian website. Its address appears in green underneath the heading and description. www.namibian.com.na.

Excercise 2: Combining Search Terms

Google's useful for finding websites in the way we used in ex 1. But it's also helpful finding out information too. Often, though, the information you want to find isn't as simple as finding a website. That's why Google will search not just one word, like Namibian, but up to ten words at a time. Those words, when you use them to search, are called keywords or search terms.

Combining keywords is a fast way to narrow down a search. Want proof? Compare the number of hits - pages found by a search engine - with the keyword 'football' and the keywords 'football Africa Namibia Windhoek premier league Tigers'. 'Football' gets about 19,000,000 hits. The other search gets about 352. (The number of hits a search returns is listed in the blue bar underneath the search field. It's on the right hand side).

But google doesn't strand you totally, either. Even though the word football appears on about 19 000 000 web sites, the search engine is smart enough to tell the difference between a website that's all about football and one that just mentions it once.

Still, how do 19 000 000 hits make your job any easier? It doesn't. So the best way you're going to search is to find ways to combine search terms to narrow down your hits. Let's say you have to find out when Nelson Mandela was born. What keywords would you choose to find that out?

You could try 'Nelson' 'Mandela' 'birth' 'birthday' 'born''date', because the meanings of the words - birth, Mandela, etc - are all closely related to the meaning of the answer you're trying to find.
But some keywords are better than others. Let's see how. Go to google.com and compare the results from the following searches:

Type in

Nelson Mandela birthday
Nelson Mandela born on
Mandela birth date

You know you've picked your search terms well when you get the answer you're looking for in the first two or three results on the first page. (Click on the blue part to visit the page, or get a quick view of the page in the underneath the heading). Which set of keywords works the best?
How many results do you get for each string? (A sequence of keywords is sometimes called a string).

Google doesn't like one of the words we put in the second search. Which one?Then try these changes:"Nelson Mandela" birthday. (Putting quotes around two or more words forces google to return a hit only when those words appear right next to each other on a page.) Try Mandela "born on". (Putting quotes around 'born on' forces google to search for a term it would normally ignore.) Then try "Nelson Mandela" "born on". Compare the top result (the first one on the first page) for each string. How different are they? Which one is the best search string? Why?

Let's use the special instruction site: to limit a search to just one site.

Go to google.com and type

butterflies site:enchantedlearning.com

Want to test your search skills? Take Schoolnet's google quiz!