Steps
Have students search a word or phrase of your choosing in Google. Give them 3 minutes to look at the results page without clicking through to anything. Ask them to notice as many different kinds of content as they can, ask them how many different things they can do there.
Considerations
- Here are some answers students might come up with. Bolded answers are ones you might want to call attention to if no one comes up with them on their own.
- Depending on the topic of the search, the top of the page may contain a selection of news stories, a selection of images, a selection of Google Scholar articles, some informational snippes (often from Wikipedia), a selection of advertising.
- Call attention to what ads look like, and how they are labeled.
- “People also ask” questions
- Note the three vertical dots next to the url of each result. This recently added feature provides a popup bubble of information about the source.
- Call attention to the Filters and Tools options in the upper right. The time filter can be especially useful.
- An extension of this exercise could be to ask students to check with the person next to them to see if they got the same results in the same order. In some, but not all, cases search result personalization affects the ranking of results. This is based on all the information Google has about its users including their prior searches and what results they ultimately clicked on.
- Another possible direction to take this exercise in would be to discuss the sources of the snippets, “people also ask” questions, and knowledge graph information. This article from the Washington Post discusses some of the pitfalls of these features (and is also the source for an excerpt in the “Thinking Critically About Google” exercise.)