Fifteen years ago, seeking for useful information in a public domain  was a challenge and where as today, we have the opposite problem.  There are lots of information available on any topic. 

The social networking sites enables the right  information  come to us instead of we seek for it.  But still, filtering the information is a key challenge.  We more often go to search engine like google  for information and filtering techniques in the google helps us to receive the most relevant information quickly.

Recently, I wrote a  job aid/reference  on “How to google effectively” and there are few beneficiary of that document personally stopped by my desk at work and thanked me  for that  job aid. That was signficantly modified by other team members in the organization and published to the entire organization.

We decided that live demonstration on utilizing google search engine using  the job aid  would  give more clarity on usage.  A work shop was scheduled and opened up  to entire organization with the limit of 40 users and it  filled up almost immediately.   I  conducted the work shop to the signed audience from business and IT area on how to google effectively using google keywords  like file type, site, define, “wiTHin qUoTeS”, and etc.

I took a simple scenario (#1), search for presentation material in educational institutes containing our company name. Run the scenario as a novice search engine users and showed the total number of relevant documents returned by google was around 1.2 million documents. Used various google key words and step wise demonstrated how the results can be narrowed down and eventually reached 9 most relevant documents.  In scenario (#2), demonstrated  how to search effectively to understand the basic definition of crowd sourcing, scenario (#3) was to find the patterns registered in core business. Had few more scenarios and explained, in high level, how google works using their pagerank algorithm and the required knowledge level for internet marketing group to increase pagerank of our web sites and eventually to increase the number of potential customer visits to our web sites.

A scenario (#n) given by an audience on how to search satellite images of a used car dealership in America. The scenario is so broad and the criteria required refinement before we jump into  search of  ocean of information.  The criteria was narrowed down just to Michigan. The results  returned as a map data (kml extension file) and these files read by free software like google earth. The kml extension files contained locations of all used car dealership in Michigan with the satellite images. Since I didn’t have google earth installed in my laptop , I could not demonstrated the results back to the audience. The purpose of the write-up is to display the results of the kml extension file and  raise the question if google should consider to directly read the kml extension file in their google maps.