Good Education:
Dying to become a master of Google’s search engine? If so, look no further than Power Searching with Google, a new, free class offered by the tech giant starting July 10th. The course promises to teach users “tips, tricks and tactics” that’ll help you “find exactly what you’re looking for, when you most need it.” Real talk: Even if you don’t spend your time dreaming about how to improve your searching skills, you should take Google up on their offer to teach you. Google’s education program manager Terry Ednacot writes on the Google Blog that no matter what your current searching ability may be—from those of us who have no idea you can use the search box as a calculator to folks who are already masters of Boolean logic—through the six 50-minute lessons of the class, you’ll learn how to use the search function to “solve everyday problems” and help you “find what you need faster.”
You would be surprised at how much better your search results, whether for school, work or play, will become if you know how to use and access Google more efficiently.
I’ve long thought they Google search was broken. This confirms it. If users need five hours of training to use you search engine, you’re doing it wrong!
Does the class teach you how to make the advertiser-preferred results go away?
Funny thing. The other day a budding designer was watching me look something up and flipped out because he couldn’t find something and I just typed a natural sentence in, which provided great results.
This is definitely a useful service to offer.
I concur- 6×50 min sessions sounds like overkill. I suspect this will be about 30 minutes of tips already available on their website, with the rest taken up by plugs for their services.
Every day is April 1st at Google, apparently.
Five hours of video is probably more than I’ll be able to watch all this month. It’s hard to imagine that watching these videos will be more valuable to me than watching five hours of WWDC videos.