With technology growing and changing each day, it's a no-brainer how important it is to able to keep up to date with it. In our current age, the simple press of a button has limitless possibilities. The answers to any question you could ever ask lie in the results of a simple Google-search. Google may not give us a direct answer all the time, but it points us to websites and articles that can.
Earlier today, the class I am a teacher's assistant in (a 10th-grader Modern World History Class) went to the computer lab to begin a short project. Since most teenagers have access to computers outside of school, or at least smart phones, it seemed that allowing them to use the computers for school would work for their advantage. However, many of the students seemed confused. They were stumped by something that I thought should come as a second-nature to them: finding information online. A simple Google search now turned into a game of search-and-find between. Well, who's to blame them when their searches were pulling up results from over a million websites?
In order to learn how to use Google as efficiently as possible, it's necessary to first understand how it basically works. Google is a search engine. It's not a calculator, nor is it a dictionary (although it does have really cool apps for both). It will never give you just one answer; Google simply alleviates the tedious task of searching the entire web for information. When you enter a search into Google, the words/numbers/symbols you use are processed and are used to find websites that have the same words/numbers/symbols, and are ordered by relevancy.
Another important factor in a Google search is word order. You can choose to have Google process a whole group of words as one whole factor. This means that instead of the words being searched individually, Google will search for websites with phrases that use those words in the same exact order. Along with that, I now have a reflex to never type a whole question into the Google search bar. Instead of typing up a whole sentence, only type up the main words that formulate the idea of your question. Adding extra words just broadens your search instead of narrowing it down. Common words (such as "and", "the", "but", etc.) are usually omitted from a Google-search, anyways, so including them is just a waste of time.
There are far more tips-and-tricks that can be used on your next Google-Search. You can do what I did, and just "Google it" to learn more.
