Return of the Google Game

More fun ideas to transform students into skilled researchers

It’s Sunday night and Amanda and Zach are instant messaging each other on Gmail chat. Their high school is staging the musical Man of La Mancha this spring, and they’re searching for some background information about Cervantes’s Don Quixote for their Spanish class. Although it’s already 10 p.m., the night before their assignment is due, these ninth graders aren’t worried. They plan to conduct a few quick Internet searches and then call it quits.

Zach starts by Googling the title Don Quixote and ends up with 2.5 million hits. The first result is a Wikipedia page. Zach doesn’t want to admit it, but the text is difficult for him to understand. He gives up before reaching the section explaining the plot summary and shoots Amanda a message: “Wiki’s pretty long. I’m not finding anything here.”

Amanda offers to give it a shot. The third hit takes her to Sparknotes.com, a site that offers study guides. She’s also not having any luck getting a handle on the assignment and tells Zach: “Keep going!”

Finally, Zach sees something at the bottom of the results page and clicks on GradeSaver.com’s plot summary, which offers an easy-to-read explanation of the novel.

“Got it,” he IMs Amanda, and they finally start gathering notes for their assignment. If they had begun their search by using their school’s remote access to World Book Online, they could have saved themselves a lot of frustration. But like most kids their age, these two teens consider Google and Wikipedia their top online research tools.

It’s been two years since I coauthored “The Google Game” (January 2006, pp. 52–54), and most kids are no better at Internet searches than they were back then. Clearly, the results of a 2005 study by the Nielsen Norman Group still holds true today: teens are impatient and unsophisticated online researchers who are often limited by their poor reading skills. But because they’re attracted to clean and simple Web interfaces, they often turn to Google—and now Wikipedia—to help meet their research needs.

The Google Game teaches kids that there’s a well-thought-out online research process that includes using quotation marks to search for certain words in their exact order (for example, “Pittsburgh Penguins” or “Subaru Outback”); using a minus sign to exclude a word from a search (say, penguins -Pittsburgh, outback -Subaru); and, most importantly, using the site operator to limit a search to certain credible sites—such as an educational institution or a governmental site—which increases the probability of finding reliable information (for example, site:edu, site:org, or site:gov).

Certainly, more experienced Web searchers have command of more sophisticated search strategies, but the Google Game is strictly meant to teach teens the fundamentals of efficient searching. As though adding beads to a string, players create a search by entering one search term at a time, separated by a space, but in no particular order. (For more examples, visit “Build Your Own Search String” on the Google for Educators page)

To help frustrated librarians turn their kids into more proficient online researchers—and help them come up with fewer and better hits—here’s an updated version of the Google Game. Even though these lessons are geared toward ninth graders, they can easily be modified to suit students in grades seven through 10.

With Wikipedia entering the fray, the Google Game requires a few minor tweaks. But it’s still the same fun exercise that teaches teens collaborative and competitive search strategies. Best of all, librarians who use the Google Game earn credibility with their students—and believe it or not—the next time Amanda and Zach’s media specialist suggests using a source other than Google, they’ll be more likely to heed the advice.

Let’s warm up with a simple search for information about the greenhouse effect and its relationship to global warming. A search for the phrase “greenhouse effect” produces 1.4 million hits, but typing in site:gov to limit the search to governmental pages cuts it down to 21,700. The number of hits can be reduced even further by adding the phrase “tropical forests,” which leads to a mere 402 results.

Googling the single word greenhouse, however, yields 26 million hits. You can add -effect to eliminate sites about the climate and limit your search to greenhouse structures, but the number of results still stands at a whopping 3.5 million. Here’s a better suggestion: if you type in greenhouse site:org, you’ll get the number of hits down to 649,000. Of course, Wikipedia is the first listing to appear, but you can easily eliminate any references to the open-content encyclopedia by typing in -Wikipedia.

Now for some real fun: ask your students to find information about how to build a greenhouse by using recycled windows. The search string greenhouse site:org FAQ “recycled windows” is a real winner with just 99 hits returned and, what’s more amazing, Wikipedia doesn’t appear (at least for the moment).

Constructing research questions that work well for the Google Game takes some practice, and tweaking them often to keep up with the ever-changing Internet is a must. Most teens are able to carry out two searches in 15 minutes, and the drama builds if the second question you ask can be answered with even fewer results.

Now that your class has the hang of it, let the Google Game begin! Pair your students and give them 15 minutes to answer a research question, then record the number of results they get as they add each new search term to their string. Remember, the goal is to end up with the fewest number of hits and, of course, the correct answer to the question posed by you and the teacher.

Since teens enjoy topics that have a connection to their school or community, a good first question is “What kind of birdhouse should you build to attract the purple martin to your home in Pennsylvania?” Googling purple martin returns more than 700,000 hits, but the search string “purple martin” Pennsylvania site:edu birdhouse attract (or another version of the same string in a different order) returns just 35. Here’s another tip: include all the necessary search terms in your question.

It’s hard to find a sports topic with a library connection, but here’s one that fits the bill: “Which Pittsburgh Steeler posed for a READ poster?” The search string “Pittsburgh Steeler” “READ Poster” site:org returns one result (the answer: Ben Roethlisberger).

Before the bell rings, be sure to ask kids who have constructed searches with the fewest results to write their search terms on the whiteboard and explain the process to the class. This is a good time for you to remind your students that the Google Game is designed to showcase their search strategies. Students should aim to focus future searches so that they yield a manageable number of reliable and readable sites. The payoff of a single result—as satisfying as it may be—is less important than just getting better at Googling.

It’s exciting to see students get caught up in the thrill of the hunt as they play the Google Game. With some new search strategies under their belts, they’re usually raring to go. Bill Gates, in a February editorial that appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, theorizes that young people are often great problem solvers because they “aren’t as constrained by traditional ways of thinking.” That healthy disregard for tradition may go a long way toward explaining why our students’ eyes sometimes glaze over during our careful presentations on database searching: for better or worse, teens want to find things out for themselves. A few easy-to-learn strategies and a couple of well-constructed questions to start off the Google Game can help them to do just that.