This week we got a blog assignment to talk about how we solved one of the activities in the Google power search basic course. Based on what the course goes thru and that Daniel Russell (the instructor) uses a Macintosh I would say that this course was made around the beginning of 2000. Not that its anything wrong with that, but it means that a big part of the course is outdated. At least it felt that way to me. I did not start learning anything before I came to unit 3, and from that point, the lecture and activities were easy to understand. If you understand English well you can just listen to Daniel and he will tell you exactly how to do the activities, and if you don’t understand English that well you can use the text version and use google translate to understand it. And at that point, if you have kind of understood what the lecture was about, the activity questions will pretty much give you the answer in the text. For example, one of the questions was you want a [ golden retriever dog] but you don’t want results from kennels. In the lecture video, he tells us that if don’t want to see results about or from something you just write a hyphen to remove the unwanted results. So, the answer to this question would be [ golden retriever dog -kennels].
The mid- course assessment and the post- course assessment were not harder than the activities either, it was just a bit more questions and on different topics. I honestly feel that my time was wasted… The course in itself is very useful, but not for me. Daniel Russell says that by the end of the course you will be 10x smarter or at least search 10x smarter, I think I got 1/2x smarter, but trout the course I felt 10x smarter because of the basicness of the course. I would recommend this course to someone who is just starting out learning about computers and the internet. I honestly don’t know what to more to say about Power search. I will try to challenge my self to come up with 5 things I think is useful from the course.
5 useful things:
- Ctrl + F: control F is something I already knew how to use, but I think it is a super useful tool to have when you are searching online.
- Filtering: filtering down your search is useful if you don’t find what you were looking for right away. By clicking on pictures, videos, scholar or one of the other alternatives, you can really narrow down your search. And in the picture-search, you can filter down your search even more by filtering for different colours, sizes, and style of photo.
- Removing results form your search: as I mentioned above you can write a hyphen to remove results from your search. For example (business model canvas -blog) if I don’t want results for other people’s blogs.
- Image search: if you drag an image on to the search bar at Google you will get results of pages who use this image.
- Translate: Russell did not go too much thro the translate function, but I think it’s one of Google’s most helpful features. If you don’t find what you are looking for in Norwegian and you are not the best at English, you can easily translate it with Google to make an English search and copy paste the resulting text in translate as well. Note that the translate feature isn’t perfect, and some things will most likely get lost in translation. But for words and shorter texts, it works well.
Want to read more?
Norwegian:
English: