Google's Chopping Block: one small chop for Google, one giant punch for mankind

      Once my favorite search engine, Google, has just lost my respect.  With all the money that Google has (enough to bail out Europe) why do they have to cut many tools that librarians have come to rely on?  According to typical stock reports, (http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=GOOG) Google made 33.3 Billion dollars this year, and it has a 36% growth rate predicted.  Now why do they think they have to trim operating expenses?   
      Google announced in August that they were removing the News Timeline from their Google News Archive search page.  And... why?  No explanation? This incredible resource for schools is now MIA.    Here's what it looked like when it was in its fledling stages in 2009.  As they grew, they added newspaper content that only helped teachers easily navigate primary sources.   They seemed so proud of this new idea when they launched it in 2009.


        We are fostering a greater digital divide in America with these decisions.  Is it likely that someday the only free content will be fee-based?  Will they cut their Google Books next?  Will Getty images and Reuters be the sole source providers of quality images.   (Shout the wikimedia cheer here.  Clap for Creative Commons!  However, the history has been told in news form and we are likely to see our news sources disappear. 
         Fast forward ten years:  With the demise of print sources, it is likely that the archives will disappear.  Where will quality resources be when they haven't been printed?  At least the small publishers had an opportunity for a big behemouth such as Google to help them archive their print as long as they were printing.   Also on the chopping block were: Google Image Swirl, Google Squared and more as mentioned in this Larry Page, Google Post . Now while I understand the rational behind some of the recent chops, the Newstime line was a shock.
    While we know the APP market will continue to grow and the computer use will shrink, I believe there is merit to leave valuable products in existance that were for the benefit of mankind.  After all, what else are they to do with the $33 billion which will grow to $44 billion next year?  

Visit the Google Lab site and see which applications were casualties and which "graduated."  http://www.googlelabs.com/   Excuse my soap box, but in education we sincerely appreciated every great free source, Larry Page.  

Healing the Search-Impaired

It comes as no surprise to school cybrarians that this generation is more concerned with speed than accuracy.  The recently released article claiming that this Google generation  has a "gap" in searching success is not news to us.  While terrific users of Google, they have barely just scratched the surface.  This article has hit the Twitterverse in storm, but it really just points out the problem--which was nothing new to those of us who teach.  Here's a sample conclusion:
     "Regardless of the advanced-search capabilities of the database they were querying, “Students generally treated all search boxes as the equivalent of a Google search box, and searched ‘Google-style,’ using the ‘any word anywhere’ keyword as a default,”
Or, "Unfortunately, professors are not necessarily any more knowledgeable about library resources than their students are."  The conclusions also mentioned that students felt disconnected from the librarians.   

The message for teacher-librarians is two-fold:

• to bridge the librarian disconnect, and
• teach students to search Google, even if you don't like it.  (Deal with it and embrace the advanced search.) 

Our local librarians do a great job of both bridging the disconnect and teaching. 

If students are swimming in Google, we have to throw them a life preserver.   While this article does a good job of pointing out what the issues are, it did not offer a great deal of advice for teaching proper searching techniques to students.   Each librarian out there probably has a few good models -- tricks of the trades so-to-speak-- which have worked well. 

There was an excellent article published a few months ago in Multimedia & Internet@Schools which really offered some basic techniques for success.  It is more important to read the answers than to just read about the problem.   Read below one paragraph from this article entitled,  How Google Works: Are Search Engines Really Dumb and Why Should Educators Care?   By Paul Barron  Jan 1, 2011 "Using Google to Hook Students



Educators know that libraries provide access to more relevant information sources and that there are specialists in libraries who enjoy helping students with their research projects. The challenge is influencing the students to use the resources.

Students’ preference to begin their research with Google provides opportunities for educators to integrate the databases hosted in the school library into their research. After teaching a student to use the advanced search features in Google, educators can show how, with minimal modifications, Google’s advanced search syntaxes are similar to the features provided by the library’s proprietary databases. After teaching students to search using Google’s advanced search options, an effective leading question is to ask the student, “Would you like me to teach you a search method that saves you time, provides more relevant resources, and that will improve the quality of your research and earn you a higher grade?”

This approach works! Lori Donovan, a teacher-librarian at Thomas Dale High School from Chester, Va., noted: “I revised my lesson plan for teaching students how to search the Web and library databases. Students were frustrated using the Web; when we got to Gale and ABC-CLIO, their amazement in the difference of the quality of information was priceless. One student researching working women of the 1930s said, ‘Google is aggravating; I found much more in Student Resource Center.’”


Or, this piece:
Helping Google—Crafting Queries Using Advanced Search Syntaxes

The search query is the only control that a searcher wields over a search engine. However, librarians know that the predominant difficulty students experience while performing web-based research is conceptualizing the search topic and constructing effective search strings. 24 The inability to construct appropriate search statements limits a student’s success in searching for relevant information.

Unfortunately, most students have not learned that they can influence the accuracy of the search results by stating a search query at an adequate level of detail to help the search engine grasp the intent of the query. 25 The remedy is to first gain an understanding of how search engines work and then craft queries to exploit the factors Google considers when ranking sites, such as the importance of the web page title and the top-level domain of sites. Search engines users should also heed Greg Notess’ dictum that the more words you search for, the smaller and more refined your results list will be for the search query. 26 Also, the more words used in the query, the less likely that Wikipedia will be at the top of the results, if returned at all.

I dare not copy and additional text, less I border on being information ill-literate and copy a "material" part of the article.  Please read the full text .  This year, as school begins, make it a goal to equip our students for success.    Come up with a slogan to drive the message.  This generation loves slogans.  They work.    
"Recipe for Success --  4 words or more will give you a good score"
"Avoid the lies, narrow your search with 5"
You can probably come up with a better one-- Or, better yet, let your students create one!

Post your favorite teaching suggestion below!  Let's all benefit from the experience of others.