All About Google : Regain Control of Your Search

I recently attended this excellent course at Newcastle University. We all use the Google search engine both at work and at home so it was very useful to be able to explore how to get the most of it and how to avoid the possible pitfalls!

This hands on course was run by the UK eInformation Group (UKeiG) and covered:

·         New developments and services from Google

·         How to narrow a search for more relevant results

·         How Google personalises your results - help or hindrance and can you stop it?

·         Google and social media

·         Using advanced search commands

·         Google's specialist tools and databases
·         Building your own Google Custom Search Engine
      The course was lead by Karen Blakeman, who is a freelance IT consultant. The complete PowerPoint of the course can be downloaded for free at:

http://www.rba.co.uk/as/

At the end of the workshop we were asked, as a group, to produce a Top 10 list of search tips; which could be search tools, individual web sites, or search techniques. It was difficult to agree on a top 10 as each candidate on the course was from a different information services background, but it made for some lively discussion at the end of the day!