This Is Not News

Following up on last night’s post, I was talking to a college friend who’s now a library teacher for young students, who are used to being able to type a question into Google and having a website pop up with an answer. (Not necessarily a good answer, but an answer.) It got me thinking about how we use search engines. I’m still used to using keywords from all my time using academic libraries, and I think general keywords are a better tool for understanding a topic because they will present you with a range of general information that you can use to build context. That way, when you do find out the specific detail you’re looking for, you understand what it really means. But that requires an entirely different kind of thinking than a natural language question search, and I’m not sure if there’s a best way to teach kids about Boolean operators. If there is, I wish someone would teach me.