The best way to learn how to properly learn all the skills of Google-fu are trial and error.  You learn as you go, if you get bad information, you learn where not to look for your information the next time.  I got a late start, not having much internet access until high school.  Today elementary schoolers learn how to search the web for information.

The one project I did need the Internet for was the International Fair in the sixth grade, where I had to research a country, do about fifteen reports spanning 6 months, concluding with a festival in which I dressed up as a Congolese person, and serve an authentic Congolese delicacy*.

*First web search required for this piece on web searching: People from the Democratic Republic of Congo are not Congolese, they are Congolian… probably.  On second thought, Congolese was correct.  Wow that information was hard to find.  I hated this project.  Nowhere on the wikipedia page or any other page from Google is the word Congolese mentioned.  It looked like Congolian, because there are the Congolian forests.  But for some reason I wanted to say Congolese, and when I Googled that multiple sources confirmed it.  However, I would have changed to Congolian if I had not originally thought Congolese.

Anyway, for this project I had to look up many statistics, including population, land area, landmarks, etc.  I am sure the first figure I found, I used, with no fact checking (my teachers would not have known the difference unless there were serious discrepancies between a project and the same country’s presentation from the previous year).

Moving to high school, or in other words, the Age of Wikipedia.  This site would be used for every single project, in part or in whole, for the next four years of my life.  Any information, history, science, religion, and english papers all heavily based on Wikipedia.  Even for book studies and reports, Wikipedia was more helpful than SparkNotes in most cases.  Our sister school, The Mary Louis Academy, an all girls school often referred to by locals as “Snob Hill”, had brainwashed students in many ways.  One of the most memorable is the false statement that Wikipedia is all made up information.  Yes, there is a risk when using Wikipedia.  No, you should not rely on it solely for a major paper or report.  No, maybe its not the most professional website to cite as a source.  That does not mean it is not useful.  I believe it is the MOST useful site for elementary research, and it should be the origin of reference for any project or paper.

Some teachers or people in academia truly resent it.  I am sure they have their reasons, whether they believe it cheapens the research process, it takes away from the use of academic journals, or even because of its prevalence throughout students.  But the truth is it is valuable.  Plenty of the information is not only viable, but it is taken directly from the academic journals, and simply becomes easier to find.  Some teachers forget to remember that Wikipedia has extensive references and citations of is own.  The facts that need to be checked on it are usually written there, and a careful researcher would find more use in the citations rather than the text.  I myself have done this, called up a page, skimmed it, and then started clicking on the sites where that information was drawn from.

Barack Obama’s mother died of ovarian cancer in Hawaii.  I know this information because Wikipedia told me.  How can I be so sure?  I clicked on the citation number, then it brought me to the link to a website.  After calling up the link, it showed the Time Magazine article where the information was taken from.  Most would agree that Time would be an acceptable source.  Wikipedia organizes that information into an easy to read page about our President.  Maybe it is not as evil as its reputation claims it to be.  Then again, blindly reporting information from any source is dangerous, and can be especially dangerous for uncited information on Wikipedia.

I believe it need to be taught at a young age how to properly rely on cites such as Wikipedia.  We would be ignorant to think that we can discourage any majority of students from using it.  In school, we should teach kids to check the Wiki-references, rather than blindly rely on the text.  We should teach them not to blindly rely on any text.  We have to take responsibility for any information we pass as fact, regardless of where we got the information from.

One way you can decipher information is by tone and patterns as well.  Ratemyprofessor.com is one of the most interesting sights in this regard.  You can tell by the little blurb whether the student is honest or vindictive in his or her evaluation of a teacher.  5’s across the board usually show a lack of interest.  Many surveyors would immediately throw out any evaluation with the same number across the board.  1’s across the board shows more about the student then it does about the class.  People need to look for high averages in the areas they are interested in, and search for reviews that look well thought out and like the student took the time to stand behind or against a teacher.  They can be extremely helpful after you get used to evaluating the evaluations.  If I had been more of a believer in the site before entering Hunter, I would have avoided Biology with Professor Alaie and would not have a giant D haunting a transcript I am otherwise proud of.

Oh, and while I am on the subject, Professor Ugoretz is right.  How insulting is the use of the “chili pepper” in the evaluation process?  How could a teacher feel comfortable with some of those reviews.  Some actually boast their chili peppers though, so who knows.  I guess its our freedom as students to pass that information, hidden behind the anonymity of the site.

A second useful part of schooling, at least one that I found useful pertaining to the theme of Google-fu, was my senior year computer class.

(Just got a text from my cousin asking what is a really good hip-hop song to download.  Google “best hip hop songs ever” and an infinite number of playlists are at my disposal, from personal favorites of random bloggers to VH1’s list which they air from time to time on a Sunday afternoon.)

Where was I?  Oh yes, senior year computer class.  It was no secret that this was a joke class, just to fulfill a requirement.  Two Powerpoint presentations, some Excel inputting, build a resume` on Word, and three web search tests.  Obviously web searches were used for all the projects, but the three tests were crucial.  Fifty random questions (e.g. Who was the third King of England?  What is the capital of Chile?  Who wrote Pride and Prejudice? etc.), some of them very obscure, others fairly obvious.  We have maybe 35 minutes to answer these fifty questions, therefore we needed to learn to use the web as efficiently as possible.  At two points a question, that is a major part of your grade.

This is also an effective method of testing search skills.  I could get on board with lowering the amount of questions, and using harder information to find.  If we really thought about it, we could come up with some trick questions and turn this into a very valuable exercise.

I started this column (as I often refer to it) with the intentions of starting off with the Nightwing’s quote.  Of all the readings, I found this to be one of the most interesting.  It is so applicable to our current state.  All the information possible to know can be found somewhere on the internet.  Some is just hidden better than others, and often the internet does not volunteer any information.  It requires real work to answer a complex question, and it requires not only critical thinking, but knowing how to ask the right questions.

In our academy of Google-fu, our number one goal as a University would have to be to teach the students not the information we may deem important, but the ability to ask the questions so they could find any information they desired.

The old Chinese proverb (which was easy enough to find by Googling “give a man a”) says give a man a fish, he eats for a day.  Teach a man to fish, and he eats for a lifetime.  The same logic needs to be applied  to Google-fu.  Give a kid an answer, he gets an A on his test.  Teach a kid to find answers, and he can accomplish anything.

We were one of the first families in the neighborhood to get Internet, and one of the last to give up dial-up, so I’ve long ago grown accustomed to getting results in as few steps as possible. For every page I had to wait to load, I wasted at least a minute of computer time, so I had to quickly figure out all the little tricks of the search engine- the minus button, the quotations around phrases, the “site:” option… This is nothing novel now, but I remember, nearly a decade ago, showing this to my friends and amazing them with my “Internet savvy.” Now, of course, we have Wi-Fi in our home and I’ve managed to string routers through the house so that even our shoddy ones give us high-speed Internet, but the tricks I’ve learned over time have become so habitual that I’m more likely to use Google to search a site than to use the offered search bar on the actual website.

I’ll admit, when it comes to research, that I take the layman’s route instead of the student’s. I don’t use EBSCOhost or J-STOR or even Google scholar. Instead, the first place I’ll look when gathering information is Wikipedia. I know that it can be inaccurate, but I’m not going there to quote information. I go there because information there is clear, readable, and well-organized. Wikipedia gives me the outline that I need, the important elements to my research topic that I might have to investigate and, perhaps most importantly, a series of links in each article’s bibliography that lead me to various articles and websites devoted to my topic matter. Once I have that, I have more than enough information.

Interestingly, in one of my classes, we’ve been divided into groups to research the same topics, and today, while collaborating with other groups, I met a girl who was researching the same topic as I was. She searched the typical databases and found very little on the relationship between IQ and depression. I just Googled the same thing and found countless articles. The tricky part is ensuring that the articles are legitimate and usable- it isn’t easy to falsify information so well that it’s not clearly false, but it’s possible. So for each article I found, I had to make sure that the information was reliable. A program from a conference of the “International Society for Intelligence Research” looks alright, but first I had to check and see if the ISIR really existed, and if it was a legitimate scientific source. So I went to their website and looked at their list of members and websites. Bingo- the American Psychological Association is one of their affiliates, and I trust the APA. Of course, even that can be falsified, but at this point, enough proof points in the direction of the link being legitimate that I can use it as a source.

Another link led me to Bill Allin’s scribd page, so for that, I went to his website and researched him and the book he’s written. For this one, I couldn’t find as many details that would prove that he wasn’t just a sociologist with aspirations to propagate his own personal ideas, so I pushed it to the back of the list. Even an official-looking website can be made by a phony, after all. If his book had been published by a publisher I recognized, instead of “Writers’ Collective,” a self-publisher, I would have readily moved his articles and books toward the forefront of my list. Sadly, this wasn’t so, and I had to select a different source on which to focus.

I think that, despite the fact that my searches don’t go through the classic academic circuits, I actually gain more from them than I would from the student search methods. It’s far simpler to find an article and follow applicable links, or to read a simple summary of an article written by a non-professional before going on to the article. Database resources might have handy articles, but the selection is much more limited. The Internet is there for us to benefit from shared knowledge, and so many excellent analyses are skipped out on because they aren’t the original documents. So I’ll continue counting on my fellow students online to help me find and collect sources and information.

I was watching a news-oriented talk show, and one of the guests made a claim about healthcare in this country.  It was a factual claim, and a controversial one, and she made it very authoritatively, but the host did not believe her.  “Come on,” he said.  “That can’t be right.”

“You can Google it yourself!” she told him.  “I’m sure there are people with their iPhones right here in the audience googling it right now.”  The camera didn’t show the studio audience, but I imagined dozens of little screens lighting up and dozens of (tens of dozens?) or fingers rapidly tapping out search terms.

But would those fingers find and those screens show?  Try googling any even somewhat controversial claim (global warming, immigration reform, pick your topic), and you’ll find thousands and thousands of bits of information–some accurate, some objective, some factual, some polemic, some funny, some dishonest–the whole wide range.

“To google” is a verb (and, sure, it includes Bing and all the other search engines), and talk-show guests aren’t the only ones who will tell you to “just google it” (or they may even throw another word in there–like in the page that the picture of Bart Simpson above links to–sorry about that link.  I didn’t choose the language!).  But there’s more than just googling involved.

If Google is the massive collective brain, with all the information of the universe stored in it (and I’m not sure that’s exactly what it is), then it also includes all the junk and garbage that we all keep (maybe longer than we should) in our own individual brains.  Lyrics to songs you used to like in third grade, the best way to unwrap a Tootsie Roll, the hate-letter you wrote to someone who annoyed you on the subway–it’s all there, along with the exact population of Tallahassee, Florida and the military expenditures of Zimbabwe and the complete works of Jane Austen and a very good recipe for paella.

“Google-Fu” (like “Kung-Fu,” right?) is a skill of self-defense and even of attack–it’s the true power today.  Just entering a search term like “global warming” isn’t a skill, it’s not even really something that should be called searching.  And taking that first link on the results page is even less of a skill.  Setting up a search, refining the results.  If your google-fu is truly strong, you can get the real result, the right result, quickly and efficiently.  And you can know the result you’ve got is the best one and be able to explain why.

But how do we teach people these skills? There aren’t google-fu academies, and while some schools (particularly libraries) do their best to help students with these skills, others just try to prevent or limit what students do with that massive collective brain.  It seems that the secrets of searching, of learning how to ask, are too often shared just by word-of-mouth.  Or not shared at all.  Can we change that? Should we?