by Chris Betterton-Jones – Knowledge junkie
During this interactive session we looked at some of the tips given in these two on-line articles:
Seven ways to find what you want on the Internet: https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/internet-searching.htm
Twenty cool things Google Search can do: https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/google-search-fun/
Chris used the Vivaldi browser on the Club laptop for the presentation, https://vivaldi.com because it allows you to switch between a number of different search engines on the fly. This is not the case for Chrome (which defaults to Google) or Edge (which defaults to Bing). Most browsers give you little choice unless you change browser settings. Here’s the selection which Vivaldi offers you.
We found that different search engines returned different results when searching for the word “Jaguar” – All of them, apart from Wikipedia assumed you were searching for a Jaguar car rather than jaguar the animal. Typing “Jaguar big cat” returned information about the animal.
Another search: “Where do cuckoos go after they have laid their eggs?” just returned general information about cuckoos – the question was too complicated! When we asked: “Do cuckoos migrate?” gave us information about US cuckoos – Finally “Where do UK Cuckoos migrate to”? Told us that Cuckoos actually spend most of their time in Africa or migrating, and only a short time in the UK to breed.
(Please note: If you are logged into your Google, Microsoft or Yahoo account, then the results will be personalised for your interests, based on previous searches you have made.)
We played with wildcard searches and minus signs and noted the manipulations of “Search Engine Optimisation” , and confused Google when we asked for the way from Here to the UK pensions office…It showed us a map of the route from “Here” (a town in Austria) to the UK pensions office in the UK.
Chris demonstrated Google scholar, and played with phrases in Spanish, but forgot to demonstrate Google image search.
April 2022