The Joy of Search is the title of Dan Russell’s forthcoming book about search strategies. I pre-ordered my copy from Amazon about six weeks ago and am eagerly anticipating its arrival this fall. Dan Russell’s official title is Senior Research Scientist for Search Quality and User Happiness at Google. What he does that you, I, and students should care about is craft really interesting lessons on employing a wide variety of search strategies. You can find many of those lessons in his regular series of search challenges on his blog SearchReSearch. And if you get a chance to hear him speak at a conference, take it!

Back to the book, The Joy of Search will be available this fall. In the book you’ll find stories used to explain how to employ various search strategies. To get a sense of what the book is about, you can get a free chapter of the book right now from Dan’s blog. The chapter that is available is titled Finding a Mysterious Location Somewhere in the World: How to
Use Multiple Information Sources to Zero In on a Resource. In the chapter you’ll learn about one of my favorite techniques for getting students to look at all of the information that is available to them in order to form a good search strategy and employ good search terms.

Purely coincidentally, last week I posted this pair of pictures on Instagram with the caption, “can you use the clues to figure out where I am?” Read the free chapter of The Joy of Search then look at my pictures and see if you can figure out where I was when I took those pictures.

On a related note, over on Practical Ed Tech I have an on-demand webinar titled Ten Search Strategies Students Need to Know.