Today's digital coffee topic consists of a story for us all to consider. Pretend you are a fifth grader and you are excited to be learning about volcanoes this week in class. Your teacher has challenged you to build the best volcano you can over the weekend and the best winner gets a suprise. You rush home as excited as can be and turn on the computer eager to learn about how the volcano works and the best methods for building one. You click over to Google and search "volcano projects". 4,010,000 results are generated with this search.
An adult is more adept to shift through this information and find credible sources than our hypothetical fifth grader. He or she would be so overwhelmed with all these results it begs the question, How much information is too much? With the proper search terms one can narrow down the results to 200 or even less if searching for a specific topic. The key to getting these specific and accurate results is to know what you are looking for.
Let’s return to our fifth grader. If he had the knowledge to more accurately search for his volcano project he might try the same search but with quotations. This small adjustment cuts his search down to 13,200, still a sizeable number. He may wish to do something he can build himself; by adding “kids can make” to “volcano projects” still in quotations, the results number only 1,840. For our fifth grader this number is much better than 4,010,000 results. He can now click on these websites with the knowledge that his results are going to be geared more to what he is looking for.
This same principle can be applied to the searches adults use every day to cut down on the overload of information allowing for more reputable and accurate results to be delivered. Today’s digital cup of coffee thought is, with the right knowledge we can narrow down our search results, but should reputable sites be this hard to come by?
