Introduction

This lesson looks at searching the web and delving a little deeper into that process than just being able to type a few words into Google. It compares different search engines, different ways of searching and improving searches by making them more specific.

Most of the tasks in the lesson are the children discussing, exploring and showing their understanding, rather than completing a concrete piece of work, and for this reason, it is suggested that they work in pairs to encourage discussion.

 

Begin the lesson with a little online safety reminder. We will be searching the internet in this lesson and although the internet content is filtered, they should understand that no filter is 100% safe. They should stick to the sites and activities that they have been asked to look at, but if they do come across anything they think is inappropriate, they should immediately turn off the screen and calmly tell the teacher (in accordance with your school’s eSafety policy)

If you are a North Tyneside school you can request any sites that you think should be blocked (or unblocked) by emailing the URL (web address) of the site to the corporate ICT help desk and explaining why you believe it should be blocked/unblocked. Contact them at icthelpdesk@northtyneside.gov.uk

 

Discuss What is a search engine?  Which search engines do they know about already?  

How do they work? - Take a look at this fantastic interactive page from Google, it takes you through the whole process of how a search engine works.

 

 

• Robots (“Spiders, Webcrawlers”)
• No more human selection
• Collection rather than selection—everything on the Web is included in a search

 

Have a look at the info and video on this BBC Bitesize page to help explain it too.

 

While Google is easily the biggest search engine in the UK (and many other countries) other parts of the world have their own brands (that many may never have heard of), like Baidu in China (one of the most visited sites in the world!)

Is there any difference between search engines? Compare a few, are they different? why do we have them all? 

Can they think of any that are used for different (specific) purposes? They may get onto comparison sites like comparethemarket.com at this point. 

Do they know any safe search engines for children?  

• http://www.dinosearch.com/
• http://www.kidrex.org/
• http://www.safesearchkids.com/ 

These all use Google Safe Search, which normally needs to be turned on in the preferences of Google (do they know how to turn it on?) but these sites turn it on automatically to filter inappropriate results. 

 

Main tasks

Ask them to open Chrome and go to Google. It should default to google.co.uk. Do they know there are different versions of Google for different countries? Does it make a difference? 

Type just the letter ‘a’ in the search box (don’t press enter) and see what results come up in the predictive list, it may vary but it might be a bit like this. Why are these sites at the top of the list? 

 

 

Google uses a trademarked algorithm called PageRank, which assigns each Web page a relevancy score.

A Web page's PageRank depends on a few factors:

• The frequency and location of keywords within the Web page: If the keyword only appears once within the body of a page, it will receive a low score for that keyword.
• How long the Web page has existed: People create new Web pages every day, and not all of them stick around for long. Google places more value on pages with an established history.
• The number of other Web pages that link to the page in question: Google looks at how many Web pages link to a particular site to determine its relevance.

 

Then change your Region Settings to the United States, by going to Settings > Search Settings > Select the US and save the changes. This models what Google users in the US would see.

 

 

Then repeat the same process of just adding the letter ‘a’ to the search box, it might look a bit like this:

 

Compare the two, what’s different and why? (see if the children recognise that these are American based websites). 

So location might affect your search results, if you ‘sign in’ to your Google account and then search it will also personalise your search results based upon the types of things you search for.

Return the Google.co.uk and ensure your region settings are back on the UK.

What do think will come top of the predictive list when they put the following letters into the search box (in google.co.uk)? Ask them to make predictions for each, then test.  

• b (e.g.  BBC)
• e
• f
• s
• t
• w

 

Refining searches

Once you’ve typed in your search query, there are lots of ways to refine your search. Go to google.co.uk and ask them to type in the word ‘Flower’ (or something similar of your choice) 

Using just this search term ask them to explore what different related things can we search for (apart from websites about flowers) using the buttons at the top of the screen.

 

 

Here’s a few.

• images (and lots of variations of images)
• videos 
• maps (probably leading to florists)
• shopping (flower deliveries and products with flowers on)
• news
• books 

 

Is there any difference between search engines? Perhaps compare Google and Bing. 

 

What can we do to improve our searches? 

Go to google.co.uk and ask them to search for ‘red car’ (or something similar). How many search results does it return?  (About 1,570,000,000 results at the time of writing... 1.5 billion!)

This searches for any instance of the word ‘red’ or ‘car’, both very popular words, hence the large number of results!

Then return to Google and type the same search, but this time put inverted commas ” “ around the search terms (“red car”) how many results does that return? (About 548,000 results at the time of writing). 

Using inverted commas searches for instances of 'red' and 'car' being used together, which narrows things down quite a lot.

 

Discuss why one is better than the other. Ask them to compare some searches of their own. (You can also go to the advanced search settings in Google (via the ‘Settings’ button in the bottom right) and achieve the same result by using the ‘this exact word or phrase:’ box) 

Some other ways to make your searches more effective:

• use just two or three keywords about a topic in your search terms (e.g. Roman army soldiers);
• don’t use common words (e.g. ‚the’, ‚a’ and ‚for’) as they are usually ignored;
• use OR to get results containing one or more of your search terms (e.g. Henry Eighth OR VIII);
• use a wildcard (*) for any words you aren’t sure of (e.g. Winston *).

 

Key Words

If we want to answer the question ‘What is the longest river in the world?’ What would you type into a search engine?  Discuss that you don’t always need to type in the whole phrase, but instead look for keywords,

 

What are the keywords in these search questions? What would you search for? 

• What is the longest river in the world? 
• What is the Spanish word for computer? 
• What does the word Stratosphere mean? 
• How many eggs should you use to make an omelette? 
• Which is faster at running, a lion or a tiger? 
• How many World Cups have Brazil won?
• How old is the Prince Charles? 

 

If you want a real challenge www.agoogleaday.com gives you three, timed search challenges a day to practise your searching skills. Some require several searches before you can get to the final answer which requires some analytical skills to decide where to start. Check them out before you use this with the students though, just to be sure the content is appropriate for your class.

 

Privacy

Many search engines collect data about you as you search the web. Why do you think they do this?

This article explains it all well:

 

Information is power. With all this information at its fingertips, Google can group data together in very useful ways. Not just per user or visitor, but Google can also examine trends and behaviors for entire cities or countries.

Google can use the information it collects for a wide array of useful things. In all of the various fields where Google is active, it can make market decisions, research, refine its products, anything, with the help of this collected data.

For example, if you can discover certain market trends early, you can react effectively to the market. You can discover what people are looking for, what people want, and make decisions based on those discoveries. This is of course extremely useful to a large company like Google.

And let’s not forget that Google earns much of its money serving ads. The more Google knows about you, the more effectively it will be able to serve ads to you, which has a direct effect on Google’s bottom line.’

Did you ever wonder why almost all of Google’s services are free of charge? Well, now you know. That old saying, “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch,” still holds true. You may not be paying Google with dollars (aside from clicking on those Google ads), but you are paying with information. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing, but you should be aware of it.

Source: http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/01/08/how-google-collects-data-about-you-and-the-internet/

 

However, there are alternatives! Duck Duck Go is a search engine that promises not to collect and share your data while you search the web. It can be enabled as your default search engine on most web browsers and devices now.

 

 

Searching tricks

Technological advancements has also brought new ways of searching with things like Shazam and voice searching with things Google voice search, Apple’s Siri or smart speakers. 

If time, see what else Google can do:

• Try a search for ‘time 1 minute’
• ‘flip a coin’
• 'calculator' 
• 'roll a dice'
• 'translate'

 

Plenary

So what is a search engine? Ask the students to talk to a partner and come up with a simple sentence that describes what a search engine is and how they work.

And finally... just for fun, Google has put a number of ‘Easter Eggs’ in it’s search engine. Try searching for these things: 

• 'Askew'
• ‘Do a barrel roll’  (normal Google Search)
• ‘Anagram'
• 'noughts and crosses game'
• 'Zerg rush' - this one only works if you click 'Im Feeling lucky' on the main Google search page at Google.co.uk