Discover the Joy of Search

Dan Russell is a Senior Research Scientist for Search Quality and User Happiness at Google. What he does that you, I, and students should care about is craft really interesting lessons on employing a wide variety of search strategies. You can find many of those lessons in his regular series of search challenges on his blog SearchReSearch. And if you get a chance to hear him speak at a conference, take it! I’ve learned tons of tips from him over the last 10+ years.

The Joy of Search is the title of Dan Russell’s forthcoming book about search strategies. I pre-ordered my copy from Amazon about six weeks ago and am eagerly anticipating its arrival this fall.  To get a sense of what the book is about, you can get a free chapter of the book right now from Dan’s blog. The chapter that is available is titled Finding a Mysterious Location Somewhere in the World: How to Use Multiple Information Sources to Zero In on a Resource. In the chapter you’ll learn about one of my favorite techniques for getting students to look at all of the information that is available to them in order to form a good search strategy and employ good search terms.

On a related note, here are the slides from my popular Search Strategies Students Need to Know presentation.