What I have Learned

I have learned many new things so far in the Google Power Searching class. The things that I have learned are going to help me with my school work, especially research projects. In Class One, I learned how to narrow my search results through color filter on Google Images. This skill is going to help me because I now know how to easily search for tables, black and white images, and images of a certain color. Knowing this will help me find the picture I want more efficiently. In Class One, I also learned the importance of word order. Before this class, I did not think about what I searched in my query, now I know that word order matters and affects the results that appear on the search page. This new knowledge will help me when I am searching for research, or just going on Google to find something else, like a recipe. In Class Two, I learned that you can use define and then the word you are searching for in your query in order to discover the definition of a word. This new knowledge will help make my research and writing essays more efficient. I will be able to save time by searching for the definition on Google instead of going on Dictionary.com. In Class Two, I also learned that in the left panel of the search results page, you can filter results by different categories. These categories include blogs, discussions, recipes, patents, books, 3D models, scholarly sources, and legal documents. I was surprised to learn that there were so many aspects of Google that I had never learned about or used. These different categories will definitely be useful to me when I am not successful on my Web searches. Lastly, in Class Three, I learned that quotes can be used to search for a phrase. This is very useful to me, because I constantly find myself searching for quotes from books, but not getting good results because the words do not remain in an individual phrase. In Class Three, I also learned that in a query, a minus sign can be used to eliminate certain words from the entire Search results. This is helpful and will make researching much easier and will allow me to attain specific information more quickly. Overall, the things I have learned are going to make a difference in the quality of my research and search results.