Search Stories Makes Documenting Research Fun

The keynote speaker for NCTIES was my friend Ken Shelton. I've known Ken for a few years now and one thing that I know for sure about Ken is that he knows how to design a presentation (more on that in another post). In his keynote, Ken shared a great idea for getting students enjoy documenting the research process instead of groaning about having to document it. Ken's suggestion is to have students create Google Search Story videos.

The Google Search Stories Video Creator allows you to create a short video about the searches that you perform on Google. To create your video you enter your search terms, select some background music, and let the creator render a video for you. Ken showed a video of a search for North Carolina barbecue restaurants. Below is a search story about an Internet-famous wedding dance.



Applications for Education
As mentioned above, having students create short search story videos could be a good way to get them interested in documenting at least a part of the research process.

Google Correlate - Discover Which Searches are Done When

Google Correlate is an interesting service that takes the concept of Google Trends and flips it. There seems to be two basic purposes of Google Correlate. The first purpose is to be able to determine patterns in the use of search terms over time. The second purpose is to compare the use of search terms according to location in the United States. One of the ways that you can discover this information is by drawing a graph over time then letting Google show you the terms that correspond to what you drew. Tekzilla has a video about this. I've embedded that video below.

Another way that you can use Google Correlate is by uploading your own data to analyze as search patterns over time and or location.

Applications for Education
I have to admit that at first I wasn't sure what to make of Google Correlate. The more I experimented with it and the more I thought about it, I realized that there could be a use for it in some academic settings. One way that you could use it in a classroom is to have students draw graphs, record the search term patterns, then investigate why certain search terms were popular at a particular point on the graph.

Using Google Scholar for Education

Google Scholar is a great search tool that too often is overlooked by teachers and students. In the 45 minute video below, Google Search Engineer Daniel Russell walks viewers through using Google Scholar to get the best results.

Applications for Education
This video is part of Google's larger Search Education program through which you can find other webinar recordings, lessons for teaching search, and other reference materials that are useful for teaching and learning about best search techniques.

You, Google, Ads, Search, and Privacy

As you probably know, Google's privacy policies were recently overhauled. The data that Google collects about your use of their services (including the Chrome web browser) is now shared across all of Google's services. In other words, what you do with Chrome can be shared with Gmail, Google Music, or any of the other Google services you use. Why did they do this? The answer is simple: advertising. Google wants to be able to display the ads that they think will be most relevant to you.

Now, it doesn't bother me that Google thinks I'm a geeky 35-44 year old (they've got my age wrong), but I know that it does bother some people. If it does bother you, there are a couple of simple things that you can do to limit the data that Google collects and shares about you. The obvious thing is to just not use Google products, but that might not be practical for you. And if you think that Google is the only Internet giant collecting data about you, you're wrong. The second thing that you can do is to use Incognito Mode if you are using the Chrome web browser. To stop display advertising from being targeted directly at you you can opt out of display ad networks. You can also opt out of targeted ads in Gmail and Search.

Here's a video about privacy in the Chrome web browser.


If you want to opt out of personalized search display there are two ways you can do this. First, don't log into your Google account before searching. Second, if you are logged into your Google account when you search you can quickly disable personalized results. See the screen capture below for directions.