Search and Teaching Your Kids to Research

To kick in an open door, whether we think instant access to instant information is good or bad, beneficial or not, it's a fact of the matter.

That means that at any given time your children and mine are likely to access the World Wide Web in order to answer a question, find school material, corroborate facts, and learn.

Search + Research = Skill

Searching the web to find responsible, verifiable, genuine information of the professional or educational kind is a skill. Like all skills, it's an acquired one.

Purely technical there are search operators to learn. political freedom, political freedom -site:wikipedia.org, and political freedom site:edu are, after all, different searches with substantially different expected levels of quality of search results.

It's not only important to teach that the results of these searches aren't impartial, objective or in some logical order but that they're ranked according to a calculation which combines measures of relevancy and popularity.

It's important to show that how this is measured and calculated differs from search engine to search engine. Doing our .edu search about political freedom on Google, Yahoo and Live returns quite different search results.

As the grouping of 10 popular titles might suggest to the searcher a topic, value, philosophy, relation, causation, agreement, majority angle or even truth that's simply not there but for the grouping of the results, these differences are not to be overlooked.

Just as important as the differences between the major search engines is knowledge of specialized search engines. Thomas from the US Library of Congress has different information on political freedom than the NTIS' fedworld.gov will, while both are totally different from the Libarians' Internet Index directory.

Evaluation

With 10, 30, 50 or 100 results in front of them, how is your kid going to pick and use the really good ones?

The fact that the search results are ranked has to have a tremendous impact on her perception of these results.

In a library our search would return alphabetically sorted authors or book titles. Each source would appear once. There would be no way to distinguish between Nationality in History and Politics (Friedrich Hertz, 1944), The Supreme Court and Fundamental Freedoms (George W. Spicer, 1959) and Ignorance and Liberty (Lorenzo Infantino, 2003) but by taking them off the shelf, checking what they say, seeing who they reference and, later on, who references them.

On the web however the order in which we see these titles has been arranged in such a way as if to convey relevance, meaning, value. Is popularity-based ranking relevant?

Likewise, which indicators can there be of a search gone wrong? Which signals indicate that a SERP might contain too many junk entries?

Going deeper into the results, to the sources it references, and thus outside the scope of what we're thinking about here, search, we would have to teach how to verify the validity of a source, of what it claims, teaches and postulates. This is a deep skill and one that will only become more valuable over time. For example, traditionally the "barrier to bullshit" has been much higher with the cost of publication, distribution and audience access for books being manifold that of a web site. Thus publication by itself was already one filter applied. With that cost removed the filter has been removed too.

Responsibility

Now, your kid has to learn these things, master these skills, in order to make it. And we're not talking about a far-off day when she'll need it at work either: it's now, today, when she's going to do her homework. It's next week's school paper she should be able to write without you grabbing the mouse in panic going "whoaaaa!!!!!"

In the best of worlds this would be taught at school. But you know what? I'm already happy the 133MHz Pentium machines (I'm not kidding you…) were upgraded last year to 512 MB 266MHz ones… OK? Besides which, they've just gone through a reform. I don't know where you live but I bet yah there's been a reform just now as well. Or was last year or will be the next. And with everything that we already think schools should teach, I'm not so sure adding Advanced Search to the list will help.

So that leaves you and me and the publishers of titles like "Google for Complete and Utter Idiots… dimwit…"

Which is kind of great because as it happens, you and I are also co-responsible for the overall quality of search.

Small, funny, ironic world, isn't it?