CONSUME - Searching!

So I was looking through my blog posts and I saw that I had done multiple digital literacy labs on Create and Connect, however, to my horror, I realized I had neglected to fully cover Consume. So without adieu, here are two of digital literacy Consume labs focused two subjects which I discovered
to be pretty insightful and fascinating.

Searching!

Using a search engine is by the far the most popular and, can be, one of the most effective means of finding and accessing information on the internet. With unbelievable amounts of information available to us, it’s important for all us budding digital citizens to know how to search efficiently and effectively.

For this digital literacy lab I took at look at searching in general. The following are a few methods of searching that, when used properly, can save the searcher tons of time:  

Boolean Searches – Boolean searches let you find Web pages that contain multiple elements.

AND – The Boolean search AND is implied in most search engines. When you type in: peanut butter and jelly, search engines will assume you are searching for [peanut AND butter AND jelly]. The search will return web pages that have all three words in them.

OR – The Boolean OR search is not implied, so you have to specify it directly. For example if you were to type in [skin AND cancer OR disease], you would find sites that [skin AND cancer] and sites that have [skin AND disease].

Phrases searches – This is a handy gem when you know exactly the phrase you are looking for. Phrase searches allow you to search for strings of specific characters. How this works is you put the phrase in quotation marks (I have actually used this one to look up a number of conference talks if I know a piece of a quote from it.). For example, if you were to search, “Adam fell that men might be, and men are that they might have joy”, the results would only shows sites that have that exact phrase. The danger with using phrase searches is that it may be too specific and people might have word phrases a little bit different than what you are searching.

Website specific searches – It is possible to search specific websites using search engines like Google. For example if you wanted to search for the BYU Cougars on Espn.com’s website, you would type Site:espn.com BYU cougars. This would then search Espn.com’s website for any instance of the BYU cougars. It’s actually pretty cool.

Wildcard searches – Wildcard searches allow for you to search when you not sure about a particular letter or word. For example, if you were to search [three * mice], it would return websites that reference three blind mice. Also, if you are searching for Hank Christensen and can’t remember if the last vowel is an ‘E’ or an ‘O’, then you could search Hank Christens*n and it will return you instance of whichever one works.

I showed my roommate these and he was impressed. Despite being in college for years, he admits he hasn’t been taught much about how to do effective online searches. In particular, he thought the website specific searches and the wildcard searches were cool and had never heard of them. I hope this list of hints will be helpful to you and specifically help you to better consume information on the internet.