Digital Literacy for Online Learning

Online information is searched using a search engine such as Google. Some of the following actions will help you to refine your Google search. Read through the list and note those that you think will help you to focus your search more precisely.

Choose and try out two of the techniques below and make notes of how successful they were in refining your search. You will share these notes in the forum in the next activity.

• Adding more search terms to make your search terms more specific. Google automatically links your terms together with and, which means it will search for websites where all your search terms are present. The more specific you are, the more likely you are to find relevant information. Note that the order in which you type your search terms will affect your search results.
• Using ‘OR’ to link your search words. Searching using ‘Facebook OR privacy’ will bring back all websites in which the word ‘Facebook’ is present, and all websites in which the word ‘privacy’ is present (regardless of whether they were about Facebook privacy). If you wanted to find sites in which all these words are present at the same time, you would need to take out ‘OR’ from your search.
• Using quotation marks to enclose your search terms. Also known as a phrase search, this will make your search more precise. For example, ‘"complete guide to Facebook privacy settings 2015"’ as opposed to ‘complete guide to Facebook privacy settings 2015’.
• Using an asterisk *. This will expand your search rather than focus it, as it is used as a placeholder for any unknown or wildcard terms. For example, priva* will increase the number or results you find by looking for ‘privacy’ and ‘private’. In this case, it may also bring up organisations named ‘Priva’, which you don’t want.
• Using specialist or specific search terms related to the subject of your search. This can be helpful, especially if you are doing research for academic study. Look for terms used within the field you are researching that help to focus your search more clearly.

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