PowerSearchingWithGoogle.com
Lesson 6.3: Conclusion
Contents:
This is lesson 6.3, it's the last lesson of the last class of the entire course. I hope by this point you think that you're a real power searcher, you probably are if you know: Filetype, you know about site: you know about minus, you know about OR. You're already ahead of 99% of the rest of humanity so at this point I want to tell you a few things about strategic considerations as you go forward doing your own searches.
First off, we know that it's really easy to use Google for very fast searches so for example you can do a very quick search for time, date, weather, recent events like that jazz concert that's coming on Friday, great, we know how to do that.
But it's often important to remember that sometimes your search tasks will take longer than two minutes. These are the more sophisticated, the more involved, the more detective kinds of tasks and I think these are the most interesting. These are the ones where we learn something, these are the ones that may take a day or two or three or you may need to take notes and actually try to coordinate all the things you find. These are important for major life purchases like a house or a refrigerator or medical issue that you might be doing research on. There's a lot of that kind of work that Google and the search engines support, so take advantage of it and don't forget all of the resources that we've made available to you. We've talked about things like Google Books and Google Scholar, you can use those to go more deeply into a topic.
It's also important to realize that at this point at the end of the class you've got a lot of tools, both resources like Scholar, like News, like Images, like Street View and so on but you've also got a lot of techniques about how to use the search operators in order to hone in exactly on what you want to find. It's important to realize the other sort of larger considerations, how you want to be precise to get to a particular result quickly or how to look more broadly to get a kind of deeper, richer understanding of a whole field.
One thing to remember about all of this is that the search engine companies are not staying still. We are always building new things, so every couple of months there's a new search operator, a new kind of capability and new resources.
So for you, what I recommend you do is go out and find a newsletter or a blog. I have one, I bet you could search for it, but what I do in my blog and what other people do in their blogs is stay on top of this rapidly moving industry. This is what Google can do now, this is what the search engines are offering these days. So I recommend that you stay on top of the world, stay on top of this kind of domain by reading those things and be conscious about it. Be very clear that this is a task for you to do now because it's not like you learned a text editor once and you're done. So what I'd like you to think about in this closing class is that we've given you a whole set of tools, you're getting huge capabilities but it's not enough. You still have to be thinking about the searches that you're doing and assessing the credibility and the quality of what it is you find. Think about that as you go forward, enjoy your searches, enjoy being a power searcher.
Power Searching with Google © 2019 Google, Inc. CC-BY-SA
(Updated 7/2019 A. Awakuni Fernald)
