Retrieval skills: high or low?

Somewhere deep within the internal systems of the internet companies providing search engines will be information about the ways that we all use the facilities they provide. The most common will be the frequency of use for search words or terms.

Most learners with access to the internet use and depend on the kind of search facilities provided by the likes of Google, Yahhoo! and MSN Search to locate information. But what proportion actually make use of the advanced facilities or common (boolean) operators to refine and narrow down their searches?

There was a time when learners were being encouraged to use higher order skills to locate information and this will still be the case for systems provided in libraries, colleges and universities for specific types of academic search facilities. A particularly powerful approach is using the so called boolean operators to refine the search process. However, it would seem that the ease of access to the internet may encourage learners to depend on low order retrieval skills with search engines. Some search engines, such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN Search, do actually provide advanced options for searches.

On the advanced page (shown above) the range of options on the words used includes finding results with all the words, the exact phrase, at least one of the words or without the words.

However, there are already a range of options that exist in a basic searches. How many learners actually use the readily available common (boolean) operators? Examples include such common operators as OR, "" (the quote operator), - (the minus operator), + (the plus operator), as well as AND or & (the ampersand) can be incorporated along with the specific keyword(s) or phrase(s) to provide greater flexibility and refine searches on the internet.

Ironically, locating the information for your favourite search engine is not always easy and they do not always apply the same operators either!!!

Why not get the search engines to do the work for you buy entering something like "common operators" MSN Search provide a useful list of the common operators with examples, but you will need to scroll down the page to find the list.

For some time, Wyoming State Library has provided a good resource entitled "Finding and Evaluating Information on the Internet" with a section on common search engine operators.

As educators we need to encourage our anytime, anywhere learners to develop and refine their higher order retrieval skills. Perhaps the challenge is for us to start using such techniques ourselves to model good practice!