Reflective Searching

Google has definitely saved my life countless times. It’s a go-to website for me and is now logged into my brain as a verb. When I was growing up, we used to play trivia games wherever we went. When we came across a question that we did not know the answer to, we were forced to just think hard about it until we came up with the answer, or we let it bug us until we found out. Now, the second someone doesn’t know the answer, they grab their smart phone or the nearest computer and look it up. Of course, I also find myself googling the answers to questions that I have; with so much information available from so many sources, it is very easy to find exactly what I am looking for with a few keystrokes on my touch screen. Although I like the fact that we have access to almost all information at the tip of our fingers, I kind of miss the old days of bonding together as a family as we tried to figure out the answers.

As a teacher, I have noticed that the world of technology has not only helped but also hurt people. It is so convenient for students to work on their devices and research information that they need to know without taking them to the computer lab or having them check out multiple books and search through them. However, it has also been a distraction. Since students can look up information in seconds, we have seen a rise of cheating in classrooms. Additionally, it seems that people are becoming less generally informed and instead rely more on their ability to just search for something rather than to actually know it.

I feel like one of my problems when searching is not knowing exactly how to word what I am searching, so I sometimes type the first thing to come to mind and settle for the results that come up. In fact, University College London (2008) states, “Young scholars are using tools that require little skill: they appear satisfied with a very simple or basic form of searching” (UCL, 2008, p. 14). A quick Google search with a random question seems to do the trick. Most students try to type in the entire question that they are trying to answer instead of taking advantage of specific keywords to bring more relevant results. I am guilty of this as well. This behavior lines up with information presented by The Information Behavior of the Researcher of the Future, which states, “One issue that has persisted throughout the period of electronic searching is the prevalence of full-phrase searching (e.g. “What are the three most common crimes in California?”) by young people” (UCL, 2008, p. 22). As someone who does this, I really enjoyed the first video and all of the tips and tricks that she showed us. One of the major things she stated was the fact that, when someone types a question into the search bar, the search engine looks for every single word in the question. If someone does not place quotation marks around the entire question, it looks for the words individually, potentially bringing up irrelevant results that happen to use some of the same keywords.

When we keep using similar question wording with our Google searches, we run the risk of being contained within a filter bubble, meaning that our searches start bringing up results from websites that we’ve frequented already or we gravitate toward those websites on our own due to the familiarity. The websites Answers and Yahoo! Answers may form part of a user’s filter bubble if they keep typing questions in their entirety, so it is important to break away from the pattern and find potentially more credible sources for information. I sometimes find that I do this myself, so when I notice that I keep reverting back to the one or two websites that I have a sort of brand loyalty to, I actively try to diversify my sources of information to be more well rounded. 

References

University College London. (2008, January 11). The Information Behavior of the Researcher of the Future.