TECHNOS

February 11, 2012

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

by Dennis Adams, with contributions from Rebecca Angeles

“Being able to use the dominant media of the times is part of what it means to be literate today.”—Adams and Angeles

Commercial Search Engines, Google, and the Web

Although it seemed like a strange approach when it was first launched in 1999, it didn’t take long for Google to become a verb and a synonym for search. It soon dominated Web search with its stripped-down search engine. Instead of being part of some bigger product, Google’s developers went without news, weather, and all the rest to focus on the search process. Simplicity and focus were two of the keys to success. Other search companies moved in other directions. Instead of focusing on technical research and development to improve search quality, AltaVista, Excite, and Infoseek concentrated on business deals and press releases. Google focused on technology, keeping sales and marketing expenses low, and putting much of its money into engineering projects. Yahoo! and Microsoft didn’t really start competing until Google was the established search leader.

Google technology is so strong that it has influenced how other online search engines go about finding information. Yahoo! even used Google’s search results and methods to win their contract to be AOL’s search engine. Google’s approach to organizing online information is based on a ranking system that is a kind of popularity contest. Each link to a page is considered a vote. Popular sites become more popular. Some readily available library materials are left out altogether. And other useful sites for students and teachers are allowed to quietly fade into the background. Such a winner-take-all philosophy is not unique to the Web, but the technology does seem to encourage more and more of it. At least for now, much of the information you might want simply isn’t retrievable. So clearly, the effectiveness and character of search engines strongly influence how the Web is used.

Either directly or indirectly, Google now handles over 90 percent of Web searches in North America. Google’s search-tagged ads have not been overly intrusive—and they are widely recognized as an effective way to reach consumers. Now that it is publicly traded, an accelerated search for profits may slow the effort to improve the quality of information that is provided. The good news is that it hasn’t happened yet. In spite of the inroads of the latest competition, positive developments seem to be moving right along. Google Scholar, for example, has made the world’s scientific and academic literature more accessible. Other search services are just beginning to pay attention to special collections.

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 (video.google.com). 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 place for news about these developments is the search engine marketing newsletter SearchEngineWatch (http://searchenginewatch.com).

http://www.scholar.google.com started without ads and was intended to be the first stop for researchers looking for scholarly literature, journals, book abstracts, and technical reports. But with such a high-end clientele, it didn’t stay ad-free for long. Let’s hope that as more search companies go public (onto the stock market), it doesn’t also mean more money-making pop-up ads and lower quality. Advertising can only go so far and people will stay away—like Alta Vista search engine’s massive ad overdose that led to fewer educational users. Whatever the ad technique, teachers have to try to keep as many advertisements as possible out of the classroom.

The most optimistic assessment is that commercially-driven companies will provide more information and services, along with more subtle advertising clutter. Along the way, it is important for all of us to remember that Google and their associates will increasingly decide which ads we have to put up with and what information can and can’t be accessed. This means that search companies will have even greater power over what we all see, read, and discuss. So, it is with good reason that information skills and search engines have entered media, language, and literacy programs of many schools.

What search engines now find for us could serve as a symbol of the country’s bustling, modernistic urgency. AOL, Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and other companies promise to speed up and simplify the vast possibilities of the online experience, no matter how complicated the Internet becomes. They also promise to make life online better while providing better services and fighting unwanted messages. Internet search providers seek the right to offer online access to library materials in return for selling advertising. Libraries benefit by receiving help in digitizing their collections for their own uses. Putting books in the public domain online is no problem. But what about publishers who worry about profits and copyright? When it comes to more recent books, Google plans to share some advertising revenue with participating book publishers.

Unwanted ads, junk mail, spam, viruses, and vulgarity sometimes come with the territory. In fact, they are such a big problem that a few schools have gotten off the Internet. MessageLabs (http://www.messagelabs.com/home/default.asp) and other leading spam-fighting companies are helping with part of the problem. Automatically replying to unknown senders is one solution. Microsoft is working on solutions, including the idea of “postage” that would make the costs of unwanted ads and mass mailing prohibitive. But spammers and advertisers are constantly finding ways to get around efforts to block their messages.

We’ll see how pop-up ad filters and the like play out over the next decade. But it would be a shame for the majority of schools to back off of Internet usage because of the problems. After all, what is missed most isn’t something that’s gone but possibilities that never happen. As John Greenleaf Whittier, the 19th-century Quaker abolitionist and poet wrote: “For all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’”

Information Skills, Search, and Tomorrow’s Classroom

In the classroom, using the Internet and computer-based activities to amplify possibilities is one thing; making sure that digital resources are used intelligently (and make a difference) is quite another. One of the keys is to understand how things work. Being well-informed in the new Information Age of the 21st century means having some understanding of how the information we gather is acquired. So, it’s little wonder that helping students critically examine the nature and veracity of Internet searches is becoming part of today’s curriculum. Along the way, students can learn how to choose, ignore, and discard information.

Today’s teachers know that finding answers to new challenges is part of the process of evaluating new ideas about how to engage students. Knowing the characteristics of effective instruction and comprehensive assessment matters. So does having a broad knowledge of possible interventions. In tomorrow’s schools, information skills and related technologies will matter more than ever. Data, voice, and video will converge to create a new dynamic.

Given the significant instructional role of information found on the Internet, it’s important for everyone at school to understand how the information retrieval process works. For teachers, this means attending to the practical aspects of helping students use search technologies in classroom activities. Being able to use the dominant media of the times is part of what it means to be literate today. The next step is exploring the hidden power of hierarchies and accompanying agendas of information gathering. By going beyond the technical details, teachers can help students gain a deeper understanding of media-associated processes.

Learning how to gather and evaluate information found on the Internet is part of the educational present. But in some respects, information technology and search applications are still in their infancy. No matter how things develop, coming innovations in search and related technologies will make information skills an even more important part of the educational future. Wireless devices, pocket computers, voice control, and connecting to all kinds of devices are already here. Soon, students will be typing a few key words (or a phrase) into a search engine and quickly going to an appropriate section of a book or document in a distant library. They will also be able to get information for finding the nearest copy of the real physical book.

Already, intelligence and transparency are being built into broadband, wireless networks. It won’t be long before searches are intelligently filtered and personalized. In addition, Google is pushing ahead with its effort to digitize major libraries—from the New York Public Library to the library at Oxford University. By making the millions of books they scan freely available in searchable, full-text form, Google has touched off an information access race with other major Internet search providers like Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Amazon. In the course of the next decade, this is going to pump things up in a big way. The growing scale of information access will help students do much better research, create new visions, and pose daring questions. What’s most revolutionary is not greater access, library books online, and new search technology—but what gets done with the possibilities.

Having great libraries and important documents readily available will allow students to be informed and inspired by the great works of the human imagination. But no matter how fast the database expands and applications improve, helping students understand the search engines and possibilities of today will encourage them to become more intelligent finders and consumers of information in the future. So explore what you have today. And get ready for virtual libraries, new kinds of searches, and better methods for getting at the priceless nuggets hidden in the glut of information.

References and Resources

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

Coppola, E.M. Powering Up: Learning to Teach Well with Technology. Teachers College Press, New York, 2004.

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

Luke, C. Wrong Turn on the Information Superhighway: Education and the Commercialization of the Internet. Teachers College Press, New York, 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 an educational technology consultant based 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 Management Information Systems at the University of New Brunswick.

Part One of this Featured Article was published in the March issue of the Technos e-Zine.