Use the "Your Search Toolbox" Google Presentation provided with this lesson to introduce students to Search. Slides that go with each section of this lesson are indicated by number [Slide #1] Stop for class discussion where indicated on the slide. Bring up the Google Search page on a computer with a projector along with the Google Presentation to do activities on the Slides.

1. Introduction to the lesson – [Slide #1] Begin with a brief overview of what students are expected to learn.

2. What matters/what doesn't matter

Suggest a topic that students are already familiar with based on their age, grade level, or content you are teaching. Using a familiar topic allows students to learn and apply these new search skills. They can more easily understand the importance of generating keywords for search and how different strategies such as adding more keywords or rearranging the keywords can sometimes change the results. 

Some teen friendly topics might include: sports teams, recycling, school and jobs, dating, music, fashion etc. Engage students in a discussion to help them choose their topic and begin to organize the search.  

[Slide #2 ] Demonstrate to the class or ask students to use their search topic and do the following:

1. Brainstorm a list of keywords.
2. Prioritize which keywords to use first. Now, perform the search using the keywords from this brainstorm. What kinds of results came from this first keyword search?
3. Reorder the keywords and search again. Try different searches appending words that are common and uncommon. Discuss how the prevalence of words can change the results. Common words (e.g., love, blue, song) may not narrow the results enough, while uncommon words may narrow the results too much excluding some relevant websites from the results. 
4. Demonstrate a series of searches or if students have computers, let them experiment. Track and analyze the kinds of search results and the order of the results that now appear on the page. Debrief how the results might be different when keywords are added, rearranged or a new string of words is picked and reordered.
5. Try capitalization variations and adding punctuation (doesn't make a difference) What do they discover? 

 

3. Spell check and "Did you mean"?

 [Slide #3 ] What if you are not sure how it is spelled? Have students practice spelling variations of the keywords, some including deliberate errors. Students can use Google search to check spelling. 

4. Trying variations of search terms and use of synonyms. 

Lead a quick discussion with your class about how synonyms can help them find what they need. What if they are doing research for [car engine] but there are useful pages with the words [automobile engine] instead? 

Show [Slide #4]. Google will often show results that include synonyms. Adding a tilde (~) right before a word in a search will ensure this happens for a particular word. 

5. Restricting results by excluding keywords

Challenge your students to think of cases when they would want to get results that actually exclude a certain word. Example: Searching for a salsa recipe that doesn't use tomatoes. 

Show [Slide #5]. Adding a minus sign (-) immediately before a word indicates that you do not want pages that contain this word to appear in your results. (Make sure there's no space between the minus sign and the word to exclude). Thinking about which keyword to exclude is as important as thinking about which keyword to use. If used correctly the minus sign can help you get exactly the results you want. However, depending on the keyword excluded it can narrow the search results too much or not enough. 

Now have your students try this feature with a few of the search cases the came up with earlier. Ask students to think about situations in which they think that excluding a keyword might narrow the search results too much and situations in which they think it may be just enough. 

6. Searching for an exact phrase

In a rather rare number of occasions one may need to restrict search results to match a specific phrase. By putting double quotes around a set of words, you are telling Google to consider the exact words in that exact order without any change. 

Demonstrate to students how searching for ["XXX YYY ZZZ"] gives less results than searching for [XXX YYY ZZZ] [Slide #6].

Explore with students what are some risks of unnecessary use of quotation marks. Example: If they search for ["Alexander Bell"] they will exclude pages that refer to him as Alexander G. Bell