Thing 1: So you think you can Google...

Objective of Thing 1: Learn how to make use of the more advanced features of Google to facilitate exploration and discovery.  

Congratulations, you’re a Digital Native! That is, you have never lived in a world without Google. Even those of us who were born before Google can hardly remember what it was like to live without it. We had phone books! And maps! And if we needed information, we had to go to the library and look stuff up in a reference book, or use the card catalog and then find a book on a shelf. Or we had to find an expert—somehow—and ask him or her. Sometimes we just couldn't find the answer at all.  

And then, there was Google.     

Toney Avelar--Bloomberg/Getty Images (for Time.com), April 26, 2016

We can now correctly expect to find the answers we seek, easily and instantly. But what about the "answers" we don’t really know we are seeking? Maybe we want and need just to learn about something, thoroughly and deeply and over time. Can Google do that too?

Why, yes it can! Or at least it can help you get started on a research journey. You just need to know how to use Google in a more advanced way, to move beyond the search box and dive more deeply into what the Internet has to offer.

Things to know: 

• Remember that Google is a search engine, and you can tell it what specific part of the Internet to search. If you type search terms into the usual search box on the Google home page, then you are "telling" the search engine to search the whole Internet (notice that the top of the page says "All") because that is Google's default setting. 

• But chose a narrower option: type your search terms, then at the top of the page, click on News. Now Google is searching only those News stories (newspapers, magazines, broadcast websites) having to do with your search.

• You can also just go to the Google News homepage at https://news.google.com/ (or Google Google News!) and read the day's top stories. The default here is news in the U.S., but you can choose to view many other countries' headlines by using the drop down menu at the top of the page. Along the left hand side of the page, you can choose news in many categories.

• You can create a Google News alert by doing a search with your terms on Google News, then scrolling to the bottom of the page and clicking on Create Alert. Then Google will send you an email when the subject of your search appears in the News with links to the relevant stories.

• Take a look too at the Google Advanced Search page at https://www.google.com/advanced_search (or Google Google Advanced Search!) From here you can refine your search results in many ways. One of the most useful is to enter your search terms in any of the boxes in the top part of the page (great tips for which box to use and how on the right hand side of the page) and then narrow your results by site or domain and choose just websites ending in .edu (which means you will get only websites associated with colleges or universities).

Inquiry Exercises: (Go to this Survey Monkey link to record your answers.) 

1. Try your search terms in:

• "Regular" Google
• Google News
• Advanced Google

Choose an interesting result in each search and describe and comment on it briefly. Be sure to copy and paste the link too.

2.  Sign up for a Google News Alert, and choose the most interesting result you get in your first alert to describe and comment on.

3.  From the Google News home page, find a story from one of the many categories (or maybe from another country) that you find particularly interesting.  Describe, comment, provide link. 

Bonus!  What is something you learned during this exercise that you were not specifically directed to learn or try?  Tell us about it!  

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DONE

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