Although using a search engine should be a pretty basic and common practice activity, most people do not use search engines in the most effective manner. Search engines, such as Google, will often correct misspellings and even leave out unnecessary words like “and” or “the” from your searches to get you the best results. However, it does not necessarily mean you are finding the best websites for your particular search. What you are finding are the sites that are best optimized using search engine optimization, or SEO. The top sites you find may not even be useful to you.
Google has actually decided to start offering free online Google classes in order to better educate people on how to search properly and find the most useful websites for their purpose. Google’s courses can help you learn how to find photos from many years ago and how to translate pages that you may not be able to read the language of.
Although search engines have made finding the answer to any question incredibly easy, these courses aim to help you search more intelligently and quickly, rather than sometimes having to go through pages of results to find a worthwhile result.
Google Senior Research Scientist, Dan Russell, will teach the classes entitled “Power Searching with Google” and there will be six 50-minute classes. As reported by Mashable, Russell had this to say: “This is open to everyone, from beginner searchers to people who already know some of the tricks of the trade. For example, you can use the search box as a calculator or filter for images by color. This course is aimed at helping people to learn new search techniques so they can find what they need faster, no matter how they currently use search.”
Also, those of you looking to gain continuing education credit for your efforts, you will receive a printable certificate from Google to mark your completion. It may not count toward college, but it should certainly help you save time while surfing the net for research purposes and will look good to potential employers.
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