TECHNOS

November 20, 2008

"Information Skills, Search Engines, and Online Access to Just About Everything" (Part One)

by Dennis Adams, with contributions from Rebecca Angeles

"Understanding both the technological limitations and the possibilities goes hand-in-hand with what it means to be educated in the 21st century."—Adams and Angeles

First, You Need a Really Good Fishing Pole

In today’s connected world, search is becoming an increasingly important concept. One new development follows another as Google, MSN search, and their associates work out new approaches and add major libraries to a digital database. With all the activity, there is little doubt about the importance of teaching search-related information skills to the children of the Information Age. Such instruction includes helping them gain an understanding of search possibilities and the different options for exploring the World Wide Web. In today’s vast sea of information, students need a good fishing rod (search engine) to get what they want. Helping them become good anglers matters. Teaching Web-searching concepts also goes a long way towards gaining an understanding of how the Web uses the Internet to share information by means of Web pages.

Web pages are screens that may contain words, sounds, pictures, and videos. They are created by a multitude of individuals, groups, businesses, government agencies, and schools. A search engine, like Google, helps you find what you want. The educational usefulness of Web searches may sometimes be exaggerated. But there is no denying the fact that searching for information on the Internet is becoming ever more intertwined with student learning and changing models of teaching. Teachers find and use publicly available material for lessons. And students often use what they find for class activities and projects.

Ever since the Internet and the World Wide Web started coming into schools and libraries in the mid-1990s, finding information has generally been the most important feature. Outside of school, it’s a little different. You could say that there is an entertainment Web, a personal Web, and our focus, an information Web. Search is the ultimate gateway into these boundless worlds. So, it’s little wonder that search engines have been so popular and so central to using the Internet. Of course, information retrieval is one thing, opening the door to high-quality information and everything else that you might need is quite another. Even the best search engines are a long way from consistently gathering high-quality information or indexing everything on the Internet—or even everything on the Web.

Neither Google nor anyone else will come close to organizing all of the world’s information in the foreseeable future. But they are trying, converting millions of books from major libraries to digital files that are searchable over the Web. In addition, they have added a search service for online scientific and academic publications. Google and just about everyone else realizes that printed books are a stable medium that has been around for hundreds of years. Since digital media frequently changes to incompatible formats, there is a certain readable elegance to print on paper.

When microfilm was the latest technology, paper pages were often torn out of books and simply thrown away after being copied onto film. Within a few decades it was no longer possible to get machines that would display the copies. Fortunately, Google and their associates are taking great care not to damage the books. Because copyright concerns are not fully worked out, the first 10 million or so books to be digitized will mostly be in the public domain.

Electronic access to books and library documents is not new, but today’s efforts represent such an enormous shift in scale that it may well redefine the nature of libraries and the Internet. Digitizing the holdings of the Stanford, Harvard, Michigan, and some other major libraries will make a big difference. In fact, some say this step towards digitizing the world’s knowledge may turn out to be as revolutionary as the printing press. We’ll see. One thing is for sure: online access to some of the world’s great libraries will go a long way towards democratizing access to information. And it will facilitate research from grade school to graduate school.

No matter how many millions of books get scanned, it will be difficult to keep from falling behind the tidal wave of information that’s becoming available. In addition, new copyright laws have taken vast amounts of what used to be public domain or "fair use" material out of circulation. It’s important to remember that many significant libraries in the United States don’t even have an online catalog, let alone a digitized collection. Outside the major industrialized countries, computers and Internet access are often luxury items. End-users also are relevant. No matter how much information gets indexed, much of it may not become accessible to those who need it until search engines can do a better job of conceptually understanding search queries.

The Search for Information and Understanding

Although the focus here is on search engines, beginners need to know a little about Web browsers. Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer (Microsoft), Safari (Apple Computer), and up-and-coming Firefox are examples of software packages (browsers) that enable users to navigate along the electronic superhighways that crisscross the Internet. But getting around the Internet is one thing; finding specific kinds of information is quite another. When students want to find topical information on the Internet, they typically use search engines from Google.Search at www.google.com or Yahoo! at www.yahoo.com. Both companies got their start at universities. But an early note of caution: Don’t assume that either one can get you the best information.

When the MSN search engine was launched in late 2004, it was at least temporarily powered by Yahoo! and promoted by the remark of Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, "We will catch up, we will surpass [Google]." The MSN search technology isn’t any better, but it does have some useful features. The "Search Builder" function, for example, is based on a system of symbolic logic developed by nineteenth-century English mathematician, George Boole. Boolean search commands are combinations of key words and connecting terms that have been used by professionals for years. But the MSN search engine makes it easy enough for elementary school students to use.

All search engines have their limitations, but are now an educationally useful application of the Internet. They have helped make the learning process more like an interactive search process—with projects, papers, group work, etc. Students must be able to find the information they need and be able to work together on it. Consistently getting the right answers to search questions is another issue. In the near future, we can look forward to more applications and more possibilities. So, it’s time to more fully understand how these remarkable tools work—and make suggestions about future needs.

Most search engines provide a box to enter keywords to describe the topic being researched and a button to click to get started. Once they find something, it is usually presented as a document title or description with links to Web sites that contain the keywords. What’s closest to the request usually appears first. So you may want to suggest that students limit their examination of Web sites to the first two pages of links found by the search engine. If there are no useful results, the next step is to choose different keywords and try again. To get a better understanding of the process itself, have your students enter the same keywords using different spellings, plurals, and capital letters at the beginning of some words. Discuss the results.

Try to get the latest programs so that students can experiment. For example: IBM has developed several new search programs that use new strategies to solve search problems. One is called OmniFind. It works well for more subtle queries. The approach is called unstructured information management architecture (UIMA). Instead of a simple keyword match, it looks for useful patterns and exposes things that aren’t exactly there. For example, after scanning an article about the American Civil War, it can correctly answer the question, “Who was the President of the United States when the Civil War started?” even if it’s not in the article. New developments in search will continue to spring up.

Understanding the possibilities and the limitations Web searching is all part of what it means to be technologically literate in the twenty-first century. Eventually, this technology will change how we learn, work, and live. Teachers can help students understand search engines and associated online tools by exploring underlying concepts and navigation options and by showing students how to go about independent online investigations. You can teach about search as a media-focused lesson, or teach it in basic subjects that require research. Some educators suggest doing both.

Providing Information Has Limits

Commercial search engines are often the first place students go to inquire about a subject or do research. One problem with this is that many free educationally useful scholarly materials aren’t indexed—which makes them invisible to search engines. The good news is that this problem is now being addressed. In spite of the fact that some students seem to think that everything is available on the Net, there are and may always be blind spots. Understanding both the technological limitations and the possibilities goes hand-in-hand with what it means to be educated in the twenty-first century.

As far as "providing all the world’s information" is concerned, Google and other Internet search engines have interfaces only with the major languages with an emphasis on English. The search engine Teoma, for example, allows searches in about a dozen European languages, and the Wisenut search engine has a little over two dozen including some Asian languages. Still, many who are unfamiliar with the technology seem to assume that if it doesn’t show up on a search, it doesn’t exist.

Internet search engines usually rely on Web "crawlers" that are automated systems for scanning Web pages and taking "snapshots" of their contents. Most crawlers cannot see the contents of a database. As a result, many online college archives are still out of the reach of search engines because they are designed as dynamic databases rather than pre-made Web pages. In dynamic systems, a Web page is usually created only after a search request has been made. So it’s a vicious cycle: no requests because there is no Web page, and no Web page because there have been no requests. Expect changes to this cycle soon.

Google and their competitors are beginning to compete on the basis of quality of content (instead of just quantity). As a result, search engine developers are working to figure out the best way to crawl through scholarly material. They are even helping academic librarians learn how to fish for crawlers in ways that attract search engines. But more often, students turn to Google or Yahoo’s search engine. High school and university students (as well as their teachers) sometimes turn to Google Scholar at scholar.google.com. Younger students often do the much the same with a children’s application like Ask Jeeves for Kids (www.askforkids.com).

Gaining access to a digital reproduction of an older text makes it easier to take the first step, but little good research gets done by simply sitting in front of a computer. The best search engine is still a good human librarian. A librarian can suggest research strategies and show you how to tap into different information resources for a variety of topics and research needs. In the foreseeable future, nothing will take the place of visiting libraries and entering into discussions with librarians and other researchers. Still, search engines often end up being the ones that go out and find specific documents.

Google continues to put libraries online and add to its standard search features. One of the latest things is video search—with access to PBS, CSPAN, the NBA, and more. Soon you will be able to type into Google Video to get everything from the program guide to a partial transcript of a program (http://video.google.com/video_about.html). Rival Yahoo is going further and arranging it so you can click on whatever you want and actually watch the video—from BBC, Bloomberg, BSkyB, etc. Both plans are at an early stage. Working out the technical problems and the paperwork associated with licensing content will take a little time. Video search is not a totally new idea, but the possibilities have been greatly expanded. A good source of information about the most recent developments is SearchEngineWatch.

Educational Problems, Technology, and Critical Literacy

Some of the most important educational problems of today are of a social, moral, and economic nature. Policy makers see systematic reform as the answer. Curriculum, textbooks, digital media, class size, and a child’s home environment all matter. But it’s quality teachers who change lives by helping students develop a love of learning that matter most. When it comes to making positive changes, information technology can be an important thing. But it’s far from being the only thing. The hard reality is that if you can’t solve an educational problem without technology, you probably aren’t going to solve it with technology.

In the future, human and artificial cognition will slowly merge in ways that are difficult to foresee. We can, however, be sure that the search functions of our digital machines will become better at finding the information we want. And we can also be sure that future applications will become better at understanding and using natural language. But at least for the foreseeable future, machine intelligence will remain fundamentally different from human intelligence. As a consequence, it will be some time before we have search engines that can competently take over many of the tasks of a good research librarian.

Ready or not (and maybe not), teaching information skills is part of what classroom teachers will be doing in the 21st century. Searching for information is rapidly becoming part of basic literacy skills. Soon, we will see even more applications and connections to the curriculum and technological innovations. For example, the usefulness of artificial intelligence has been exaggerated for years, but now the technology is reaching a stage where it can contribute to online searching. With Google and others digitizing the collections of major libraries, an enormous amount of information will be made available in the public domain, available for a worldwide audience 24 hours a day. Another area of search development is helping users identify the veracity of the facts found while connecting them to other powerful and reasoned points of view.

In spite of positive developments, when it comes to using the Internet, it will remain users beware. Once students have learned something about the issues surrounding how to get information, it’s time to learn how to sort out what’s reliable. Students can learn to detect less credible information by asking the following questions:

Who put the information together and what was their purpose?
Are the premises of the arguments presented easy to understand?
Is the evidence reliable and does it lead to logical conclusions?
Are the references reliable and can you tell fact from opinion?
Is the information easy to read and are the pictures labeled?
Is the site accurate, current, and does anything seem biased?

Remember: The Internet is like the American Wild West of old—it’s exciting, but there are many things there that you don’t want students to read, see, or hear. Teachers need to have an Acceptable Use Policy posted for students to see. Don’t let students work alone or unsupervised. This is a lot easier if students work in pairs and if you can at least see the screen out of the corner of your eye. Helping them figure out how to sort through the glut of information is key to using search engines productively in the classroom.

It’s important for students to recognize the fact that a search engine serves up information in only one of many possible representations of reality. Many powerful insights and much information simply doesn’t come into view. The mechanics behind the search functions of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and their associates are not transparent to most users. As a consequence, many of us (without much thought) buy into a kind of informational-cultural system that shapes our values, beliefs, and a significant amount of what we learn.

References and Resources

Adams, D., Literacy in a Multimedia Age. Christopher-Gordon Publishers. Norwood, MA, 2002.

Friedman, B., Web Search Savvy: How to find Anyone or Anything on Deadline. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004.

Miller, S., Web Searching Strategies: An Introductory Curriculum for Students.* International Society for Technology, 2003.

* This activity book provides lessons and ideas for helping students (grades 412) make the best of search engines. It is primarily aimed at middle school and secondary students who are fairly new to the Web searching process. Reproducible worksheets can be found in the second half of the book; answers are in the appendix. The activities are primarily designed for the search engines Google, Tecoma, and Alta Vista. In addition to explaining how search engines work, Web Searching Strategies connects to the national technology standards, and provides techniques for evaluating Web sites.

O’Hara, S., Easy Google. Que Publishing, 2004.

O’Harrow, R. No Place to Hide: Behind the Scenes of Our Emerging Surveillance Society. Free Press, 2005.

Dennis Adams is a consultant working in San Francisco. He has taught at the University of San Francisco and McGill University in Montreal. Email him at: dadams@usfca.edu. Rebecca Angeles is Associate Professor in the Management Information Systems at the University of New Brunswick.

Part Two of this article was published in the April 2005 Technos e-Zine.