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How NOT to search with Google
By Rosie Perera | May 19, 2010 at 7:33 pm
I am frequently amused by the ways people find me on academia.edu, where I have a page describing my research and writing on faith and technology, among other things. Academia.edu lets me see what keywords people have been using on Google when they find my page. Some of them are what I’d expect, and it’s gratifying to know people are looking for me in particular, or something to do with faith and technology, and are finding my paper on Technology and Christian Spirituality. Some of the examples of good Google searches which have landed people on my page are:
Perera’s technology sabbath
technology spirituality
rosie perera regent
Christian technology “fine arts” Wolterstorff
Why are these good searches? Excellent relevant keywords. No extraneous fluff words (they are not necessary and don’t help narrow down a search). And some people know how to use phrases in quotes to be even more precise in their searches.
Now how should you NOT use Google? Here are some examples of bad search strings:
1) reserarch paper on what does christian spirituality mean to me
2) give me some questions on the topic christians versus technology
3) suggested titles for research about christian spirituality
4) ideas for a spirituality paper
5) What relevance does martin Heidegger’s critique of technology have in this “connected” age? Begin by describing what his understanding of the “essence” of technology is, and how he envisions the “dangers” it creates for us.
6) the problem of technology and christianity
7) technolgy “ontology of the age”
I’m going to rip these to shreds one by one. First of all, it’s clear that Googlers 1-5 have a school assignment and are looking for someone else’s work to help them either come up with a topic for their paper or even write part of the paper for them. I don’t have a problem with using the internet for research but the laziness with which these searchers are asking their questions leads me to suspect they are hoping for more than just inspiration and information, and they don’t have good research skills.
#1 – if you’re supposed to write a paper on what something means to you, you probably won’t find the answers to that online; it would also help if you could spell research
#2 – Google is not a person to whom you ask for things (“give me some…”), and on, the, and topic are all throw-away words that do not help the search at all. In fact “on” and “the” are probably among the small words that Google just ignores (so why waste your time typing them). The word “topic” is probably included in the search but including it means that you are limiting the results to pages which include the word “topic” which is probably too restrictive in thise case.
#3 – “suggested titles” — lazy searching; you’ve got to find the ideas and come up with titles yourself based on smart relevant keyword searching
#4 – totally lazy — I’m willing to bet nothing useful came of that search
#5 – I kid you not! Someone actually typed (or rather probably copied and pasted) this entire thing into Google to try to search for the answer to a question on an exam. Aside from the lack of academic integrity this betrays, such a search is virtually useless. The more words you put in your search the more restrictive it is. When there are not quotes around a long phrase, and no AND or OR between the words, Google defaults to AND as the Boolean operation combining the search terms. In other words, that long search would result in only web pages that mentioned each and every word in those two sentences (not counting short words like “of” and “the” which are ignored). Quotes around single words would be ignored by Google.
#6 – we’re getting warmer here; but the, of, and and could have been omitted to save typing time, since they are all going to be ignored by Google anyway; the rest of the keywords are good choices; they are specific and relevant
#7 – good use of combining search terms and quoted phrases, but again spelling things correctly is a must; Google is pretty smart about suggesting correct spellings if you mistype something, but it’s still better to get in the habit of good spelling for more accurate search results
OK, off my soap box! 🙂
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