Google: Learning to search better through play

Efficient internet searches are essential for the knowledge workers of tomorrow. The question remains: 'how do you best learn something like this?' Do you integrate these information skills into other assignments or do you practice them explicitly? And in the latter case can you appeal to a not entirely unsuspecting source, namely Google itself?

With a Google a day you are presented with three questions every working day that you have to solve. The questions come from geography, science, history and culture. The faster you find the answer, the more points you have left (gamification). The questions are in English and quite challenging.

Google uses a special version of its search engine for this: Deja Google. That is a kind of time machine that ensures that you can look for the solution as if the question had not yet been launched. In this way, Google prevents someone from posting the correct answer somewhere on the net and undermining the search game.

A Google a day is especially suitable for people who are already doing well on the net and want to increase their skills in a playful way. If you want to offer more support, you can also use the lesson plans that Google offers online that go deeper into the searches of a Google a day .

These lesson plans are divided into three levels: beginner, intermediate & expert. You work on different search strategies. Each lesson plan is accompanied by a short presentation in which the student receives tips on how to successfully complete the challenge and in which afterwards it is also explained how you could have found the solution.

Those presentations are made in Google Drive and are released under a Creative Commons license (Attribution – Share Alike). So you can adapt and translate them. These tutorials from Google are part of their Inside Search website, which contains a lot of info about how the search engine works.

Google doesn't do this out of altruism, it's a form of customer loyalty. It is a good idea to point this out to students. Also make them aware of alternative search methods such as Wolfram Alpha , Instagrok , DuckDuckGo and don't forget the library.

Information and research proficiency goes far beyond locating relevant information, of course, but it is usually the first step. As learners' searches improve, it will then become easier to show them how to evaluate, organize, and ethically use that information.

If you find the questions on a Google a day too easy, you can indulge yourself in Daniel M. Russell's extremely difficult questions: SearchReSearch .