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This Week's Homework (2/10/2011 - Week 6)
Using Google
Google Search has been my primary search engine for many years now and I find myself using it daily for both work and personal pursuits. I am not alone with my day-to-day use of Google, which has made Google synonymous with the Internet for it’s service as the most adept guide to all of the information we seek.
As for how I use Google to search, the development of this skill has been rather intuitive. The way Google has adapted to how people like to search is one of its greatest achievements and this accomplishment is often taken for granted! For the surfer who is looking for a little more control over their search Google has incorporated an easy to use tool, the Advanced Search, to filter your results. For the true Google aficionado you can optimize your search using a litany of different punctuations but this takes some time to truly master.
Another resource Google has provided is the Search Feature page. Being comfortable with Google’s main search tool, the word search, I didn’t find this resource particularly helpful since it seemed to only create an additional step of finding a category for my search when I could very easily get the same information from the regular word search. I also found some of the features such as the spell checker more difficult to use since when I look to find the spelling of a word through the word search the search adapts as I type and provides me the correct spelling before I even finish typing the word whereas the spell checker makes me blunder through the entire word to reveal it’s true spelling. Yes we’re talking about seconds here but Google’s MO is getting the information you need as quickly as possible! The above rant may seem like an assault on Google’s Search Feature but I would rather look at it as a testament to the power of Google’s original word search tool. For someone new to searching with Google the Search Feature would be a helpful resource but I encourage anyone who uses Google often to master their search through it’s word search tool. After all Google has made this skill very attainable to everyone!
On a side note one feature that I would love to see is a proper exectuion of the askjeeves concept (today known as ask.com) where we simply ask the search engine a question and it gives us the desired answer since that is ultimately what we expect from our search engines.