Throughout the interviews, students mentioned Google 115 times -- more than twice as many times as any other database. The prevalence of Google in student research is well-documented, but the Illinois researchers found something they did not expect: students were not very good at using Google. They were basically clueless about the logic underlying how the search engine organizes and displays its results. Consequently, the students did not know how to build a search that would return good sources. (For instance, limiting a search to news articles, or querying specific databases such as Google Book Search or Google Scholar.)I believe we've got some librarians here who may wish to comment.
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
WHY CAN'T THEY BE LIKE WE WERE, PERFECT IN EVERY WAY? Kids these days don't know how to use the Google, according to a study of research habits of students at five Illinois universities:
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No not get me started. Really. No one wants to hear my soapbox rant about how single searchboxes *ahem, Google, ahem* have ruined the search experience. Advanced search, people. Boolean logic is your friend, as is filtering. I wrote an entire paper for my comprehensive exam in library school about simple vs. advanced searching. When people tell me that we don't need librarians anymore, I'll point them to this article.
ReplyDeleteWelcome to my daily nightmare.
ReplyDeleteWe just completely redesigned our library homepage and put it online a couple of weeks ago. We used to have a link to Google Scholar (which would push you through our proxy server on the way - thereby granting you full-text access when clicking on links to journals to which we subscribe) on the front page. The overwhelming number of comments/questions/calls we got after the debut of the new page? "Where'd you put my Google Scholar?"
When I teach students the paid databases I almost ALWAYS switch them into the advanced search, and while doing so, tell them, "Come on, you're in college now. Time to put on your big girl britches."
The other analogy I use is one I borrow from my brother's profession (race car driving instructor) - If you're driving a high-performance sports car, you don't want to be using an automatic transmission. A manual transmission is a little more work, yes, but you get so much more control and precision and it means you're the one ultimately in charge. Feel the power, vroom vroom!
ReplyDeleteI'm a journalist, not a librarian. But I certainly can rant. The thing that bugs me most is not that people don't know how to search on Google, but that they don't even understand that Google is a search engine. I hear people all the time say things like, "According to Google ..." or "Google says that ..." as if Google itself were one big reference book.
ReplyDeleteMoreover, even if people find something via Google, they're incapable of separating reliable from unreliable sources. What's the point of doing research online when you can't tell the difference between information and misinformation? You might as well just make sh-t up.
<span>I hardly think that "kids these days" as a whole are google-illiterate, nor do I believe that said illiteracy is limited to the under-21 crowd. I work in a university library fielding IT questions and run into people of all ages who can't find a program if it's not on the desktop, let alone c</span><span>raft </span>effective search terms<span>. Most likely, those interviewed who don't understand the logical underpinnings of a google query </span><span>have difficulty with following basic instructions that exceed two steps, as well as simple if-then logic. </span>
ReplyDeleteI'm an attorney. I had rather expected that young attorneys, who had experience with Google and other search engines before attending law school, would come into the legal profession more capable of being great researchers. From what I can tell, the opposite is true. The typical Google search is like a machete, but it's a good enough machete that a lot of people never learn to use a scalpel.
ReplyDeleteI love that analogy - I'm stealing it for future instruction sessions.
ReplyDeleteWhen I read this story a few days ago, I completely changed my curriculum for teaching my students how to research their papers. I was definitely guilty of assuming they had skills they apparently do not have.
ReplyDelete