Category: searching

Posted in advertising, Google Images, searching

Google Images Now Come With Ads!

Posted on by Marti Weston
Google Towel Search
I searched Google Images for towels.

We will now see advertisements on many of our Google Image searches.

In a March 5, 2019 blog post, Google announced a new advertising promotion that will appear in Google Image searches. According to a post, written by Surojit Chatterjee, the company’s data indicate that many people who consult Google Images are actually shopping for products and looking for pictures of items they might purchase. So the company has created “shoppable ads” that will appear at the top of the image page illustrating where items can be purchased.             Continue reading “Google Images Now Come With Ads!” →

Posted in 21st Century life, newspapers, parents and technology, searching, searching for information

A Tale of Two Online Newspaper Searches

Posted on by Marti Weston
fullsizerender
The newspaper article in the morning paper

It’s Monday morning and over breakfast I’ve found two articles that I want to read more closely, perhaps to share on my blogs — one in the New York Times and the other in the Washington Post. When I decide to share, I usually print out the article, mark it up a bit, and copy the all-important link. My digital life features online newspapers, but in the mornings I still love to look over the paper version,

The 21st Century searching experience for the two newspapers could not be more different.

On the Times website I search for the headline that I’ve just seen and up pops my article. Within moments it’s printed and ready for me to study. Interestingly, even if the Times’ online version leads with a different headline, my article will pop up with a search for either headline.     Continue reading “A Tale of Two Online Newspaper Searches” →

Posted in data collecting, media literacy, media messages, parents and technology, searching

Your News, My News – Do We Get the Same Views?

Posted on by Marti Weston

screen-shot-2016-12-07-at-10-24-28-amAccording to a video shared by the DuckDuckGo website, when we  search for information on Google each of us can get slightly different, or sometimes enormously different results – even if we use the exact search terms in the exact order and at about the same time. DuckDuckGo, a search engine that emphasizes privacy, is a Google competitor.

The order of Google’s results may guided by what it knows about the individual who is doing the search. (Check out Ghostery to identify trackers on any or all of your pages.)

Collected information – including any previous searches, where we live, what we read, where we get our news, what we purchase, how much we travel, and much more can affect what we see in the results. I never thought about this much, but I do remember how a few years ago a group of my middle school students were searching on Google for information, and I noticed and was puzzled that similar searches sometimes generated lists of slightly different results. Continue reading “Your News, My News – Do We Get the Same Views?” →

Posted in 21st Century Learning, digital literacy, keywords, parents and technology, research on the web, searching, searching for information

Keywords Matter: Children Must Know How to Use Them

Posted on by Marti Weston

51ST8V7G1EL._SX311_BO1,204,203,200_Maya Bery, a technology/media colleague, who also happens to be a former student, shared this delightful description about two 21st Century children searching for answers.

Two third graders came in this morning looking for the dog books because they’d seen a dog and could not remember what it was called. It was driving them CRAZY!

They looked through the dog encyclopedias to no avail. Searching online for short, fluffy dogs yielded nothing. Then they told me that the dog had short legs. We added that to our Google search and found the answer in two seconds flat. It was a corgi.

Keywords matter!

Continue reading “Keywords Matter: Children Must Know How to Use Them” →

Posted in 21st Century life, 21st Century parenting, data collecting, digital footprings, digital footprints, parent child conversations, parents and technology, searching

Google Dashboard: A Connected-World Teaching Tool for All Ages

Posted on by Marti Weston
A screen show from the Google Dashboard.
A screenshot from the Google Dashboard.

If you use Google, take a few minutes to check out the Google Dashboard and look over a detailed digital footprint snapshot of your Google activities. Learning about digital footprints is an important 21st Century connected-world skill.

The Dashboard keeps track of everything — and I mean everything — that you do on Google. It’s a dynamic digital footprint collection. To sign in and examine your Gmail or Google Alerts is easy, and you can also check out the other features offered by Google such as Google Docs, Google Calendar, Blogger, or Google Reader (many more Google products are available and new ones become available on a regular basis).

Google Dashboard is an awesome connected-world teaching tool for 21st Century children at any age and for adults, because it makes a point — concretely — about the amount of information that Google accumulates on each of us. Many people are surprised, and a bit disconcerted, on a first visit, because the Dashboard depicts a good deal about each user.

Continue reading “Google Dashboard: A Connected-World Teaching Tool for All Ages” →

Posted in 21st Century parenting, Back-to-school digital reading, curated resources, digital citizenship, online learning, parents and technology, searching

Teaching Kids to Search Well and Evaluate What They Find

Posted on by Marti Weston

TechforSuccessMy post, Back-to-School Research Tip: Help Your Child Use Curated Online Databases, is posted over at the Platform for Good website. It describes strategies that parents and educators can use to help children understand more about quality searching and help 21st Century kids become better evaluators of their search results.

To get the new school year started in a digitally sensible way, please take a few minutes to read my post and learn ways to direct 21st Century children to resources curated by experts, materials chosen to help students get good results when they search. The more they encounter quality search results, the better they will become at recognizing poor quality when they use a less curated searching tool.

On the same page, at the right, is a wonderful graphic called Tech for Success that I will definitely use as a handout with students and their parents during the 2014-15 school year. Similar to an acrostic poem, the graphic uses the word “success,”  spelling it down the left-hand side of the page and attaching an important digital citizenship message to each letter of the word.

Posted in 21st Century Learning, 21st Century life, 21st Century teaching, parents and technology, searching

Why Word Order Matters When You Search!

Posted on by Marti Weston

The word order of a search matters in today’s connected world, so 21st Century learners of all ages should understand how search results change when a user rearranges the words. A short video on word order, uploaded by Google’s Search Anthropologist Daniel Russell – check out his Search-Research blog – teaches this lesson effectively.

Use this less-than-two-minute video, featured some months ago in a blog post at Free Technology for Teachers, as a quick and succinct teaching tool with students, parents, and other educators.