Teaching how to search is always a tricky area for teachers. Most simply don't have the deep understanding of how a search engine works (I readily include myself in that category) to explain things in simple terms to children. Today I was using World War 2 to enter the world of Boolean search terms.
First we listed the number of different ways World War 2 could be written. We found:
- World War 2
- World War Two
- World War II
- WW2
- WWII
- Second World War
- 2nd World War
We then tested a couple of search engines to see if they produced different results for each term (they did). So far so good.
Next we introduced the "or" term using Boolify (a great site for teaching searching)
This is what we did:
Next we started to narrow it down to our topic focus: local history. So, we introduced "and".
It all worked brilliantly, doing exactly what we expected. Then we tried it on some real search engines.
And the results turned out oddly.
Clearly the search engines weren't recognising our Boolean searches. A little digging revealed the following: for Ask, Bing and Google the Boolean operators need to be in capitals. This was a fact that I'm sure I learned once but had forgotten. Anyway, we repeated our searches and got the following results:
At this point I admitted defeat. According to the Ask advanced search tips, it should recognise the OR operator, but clearly doesn't. Both Google and Bing kind of did, but when adding a second OR statement, both lost a million results. Am I missing something here? Or has search engine technology moved on to such a degree that teaching a simple Boolean logic search is so out of date as to be irrelevant? Can someone with a much bigger brain than me explain it in words that my year 6 class will understand?