www.google.co.uk/intl/en/insidesearch/howsearchworks/
Google offers a collection of Search Literacy lessons covering:
- picking search terms
- understanding search results
- narrowign a search to get best results
- searching for evidence
- evaluating credibility of sources
Lessons are pitched high and you may need to adapt level and content to suit children.
LGfL Us Online provides 'Megabyte' and 'Boogle' activities that focus on evaluating information and reliability of sources. Also worth exploring is Information Detectives, a collection of lessons and resources prepared by Somerset LA.
Google Search Literacy lesson focusing on evaluating the credibility of a source.
For activities focusing on evaluation of web content see this collection of lessons and links by November Learning.
Google has created a subject themed collection of search literacy challenges called A Google a Day. Featuring deliberately problematic questions children must apply their search literacy skills to find answers.
For further links to resources visit the Primary E-safety Matrix (Safe Search tab)
Use search technologies effectively, appreciate how results are selected and ranked, and be discerning in evaluating digital content
Using search technologies involves aspects of computer science, information technology and digital literacy. Effective use of search engines gets the results you want. It relies on specifying the right keyword, skimming and scanning the results to see which seems most relevant, and distinguishing between the main results and adverts presented as sponsored results. It may also involve using other features7 of the search engine, including searching for phrases rather than keywords, or limiting searches to a particular time frame, language, reading level or website.
In order to return results, search engines use ‘web crawler’ programs. These programs visit the pages of the web, follow the links they find and can make a copy of each page visited. The pages are indexed, keeping track of keywords on each page. When you enter a search query, the search engine returns pages from its index on which your keyword(s) or phrase appears.
Search engines take many factors into account. At the heart of Google’s algorithms8 is ‘PageRank’, which determines the quality and rank of a page based on the quality of the pages that link to it. Their quality is, in turn, determined by the quality of the pages that link to them, and so on.
Just because a page has a high rank in Google or another search engine for a particular query, it doesn’t mean that the content is true, age-appropriate or relevant to a particular project. Pupils need to develop skills in evaluating digital content, including how trustworthy the information is (perhaps by verifying it with another independent source), whether it’s something that the audience for a project would be able to grasp, and why the content was posted in the first place (e.g. to give a balanced overview, or simply to advance one side of an argument)
