Search+Engines

The Internet is a powerful tool. One of the most important aspects of teaching web literacy is getting students to validate their resources. Students, especially younger ones, will benefit from knowing that the Internet is a business. Therefore, companies can pay to have their sites jump to the top of the list in the hope that the searcher will click on theirs.

Pose some critical thinking questions:


 * Which search engines have lots of ads and which seem to have fewer?
 * How does one search engine compare to another?
 * How do you think people choose which site to go to after the run a search?

It is easy to go with the first page of options. But if you look closely, the sponsored sites may not be unbiased or may have a sales angle in their purpose, rather than informational.

So here is a step in the right direction in getting students thinking about how search engines work. I learned of this exercise from [|__Web Literacy for Educators__]by [|Alan November]. It is an opportunity to explore and compare, then analyze how search engines are set up and how the same search on different tools can turn up different results.

Steps: 1. Provide a topic to search and have the students use their search engine of choice. For the first one, try "octopus." See if the site [|www.zapatopi.net/treeoctopus] comes up. See where it sits in the line up of choices, then click on it. 2. Discuss the content and whether it seems valid or invalid. Discuss that everything no the Internet doesn't have to be 100 correct. Anyone can write anything, whether fake or just their opinion, and publish it for others to read. 3. I created a fur.ly (see explanation in nav bar if you don't know what a fur.ly is) with various search engines he suggested to explore. [] Provide more random topics and spend a few minutes thinking and talking about how to make good choices in using these tools.

Source: November, Alan C.. //Web Literacy for Educators//. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, 2008. Print.