The Joy of Search is a book that I’ve been recommending for a couple of years now. It’s all about search strategies and is a must-read for anyone who wants to develop better search strategies or teach search strategies. The book was written by Dan Russell whose title at Google is Senior Research Scientist for Search Quality and User Happiness. 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, in The Joy of Search 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.
On a related note, over on Practical Ed Tech I have an on-demand webinar titled Ten Search Strategies Students Need to Know.
This post originally appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. Featured image by Richard Byrne.
