Whether you are a student who needs to search the Web for a class project, or a business person needing to find reliable information, the Web can be both incredibly useful and incredibly annoying. Knowing how to search for reliable information is a skill you can learn.

Some schools and colleges provide classes to help students become better at finding accurate, reliable information on the Web; most do not. For business people, it is generally a matter of learning by trial and error. Many people just try a phrase or two in a search engine like Google or Bing, and then try to figure out which of the search results they will go with.

Improving your skills

If you are willing to invest some time in learning from the experts, there is an excellent resource of online webinars available. The archive is free, and the webinars are typically each about one hour in duration.

Before you react with a “An hour? No way!” stop and think for a minute about how much time you spend every week, searching on the web. If your class or business tasks require you to do a lot of searches, you are probably investing hours in the task. Would an hour or two of learning be worthwhile if it shaved an hour a month from your search time?

The resource is an archive of recent webinars by Google’s search engine education team. Topics include:

  • Tools for Assessing Authority on the Web
  • Beyond the First Five Links: Using Google’s Left-Hand Panel to Reveal The Good Stuff

You can find the archive here.