By Kimi Fleming
Many people don’t know how to use Google Search efficiently, but it’s time for them to learn; that’s the message Dan Russell conveyed Thursday, Sept. 26, at the University of Maryland during a discussion of his new book.
“This is not an optional skill,” Russell, the senior research scientist for search quality and user happiness at Google, said. “I want everyone to have this sense of what their search skills are.”
His book titled “The Joy of Search: A Google Insider’s Guide to Going Beyond the Basics,” is a compilation of stories from Russell’s blog that exemplify how Google Search can help solve real-world problems.
According to Russell, people often search for something only once or twice before giving up on their question, but this is not an effective use of the search engine.
“You have to think [like] a searcher: what’s the quality of the instrument I’m using to find this stuff?” Russell said. “What is it not telling me? How do I, as a person using these tools, think about this? What’s my mental model? What kind of stuff is indexed?”
He added that sometimes you may have to go to a library or archive to find the answer you’re looking for.
“I encounter all kinds of students who think that if it doesn’t exist on Google, it doesn’t exist; It’s not real,” Russel said. “False.”
Russell graduated from the University of California at Irvine in 1977 with a bachelor’s degree in information and computer science and received a doctorate in computer science from the University of Rochester in 1985. He worked at Xerox PARC, Apple and IBM before moving to Google 14 years ago.
The audience was full of students, professors and librarians eager to hear what Russell had to say.
“I think in a college setting, students should definitely learn [to use Google effectively] because so many of our assignments involve scholarly research,” freshman finance and journalism double major Sean Liu said. “I feel like if you actually know how to use that engine, it can raise the quality of your work and efficiency.”
Other members of the audience believed that while it is important to learn how to effectively use the search engine, Google must also play its part.
“I think that we should be responsible individually for our search strategies,” life sciences librarian Jodi Coalter said. “But I think that Google also has a responsibility to understand that if they’re going to provide the service, they also need to provide a certain level of accountability.”