Search Lab
Search a small made-up web. Guess what a command will do, try it, then compare the two lists.
Mission 1 of 6
You are hungry. Find out how to make the food called a hot dog.
Ordinary search: hot dog
2 pages
1. Make a hot dog
- Has all these words: hot, dog
2. Look after your dog on a hot day
- Has all these words: hot, dog
The four commands
| Command | Example | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Inverted commas | "hot dog" | Keeps the words together, as one phrase. |
| Minus | bat -cricket | Leaves out pages that have the word. |
| Tilde | ~big | Also finds synonyms: words that mean nearly the same. |
| Define | define herd | Shows what a word means. |
Watch out for homophones
Homophones sound the same but have different spellings and meanings, such as see and sea. A search engine looks for the spelling you typed, so check you have the word you mean.
For teachers
This tool goes with Unit 2, Lessons 6 and 7 (Using more complex search techniques) of the Year 4 Inspire Computing student book. It can come before, or stand in for, the activities that compare searches on a real search engine.
- Before the screen: give each pupil a card with a few words on it. Call out a search. Pupils stand if their card matches, then sit if the minus word is on their card.
- The tilde no longer works on Google, which dropped it in 2013, so the book's activity will show no difference there. It still appears in the end-of-unit assessment, so this lab makes it behave as the book describes and tells pupils so. The book's fallback, typing synonym before a word, also works here.
- Try the other commands first on the search engine your class will use, as search engines change how they treat them.
- The missions are in the same order on every device, so you can put one on the board and take a class vote on the guess.
- Exit question: you want pages about the fruit called a date, not about the day of the month. Write your search.
- Searches stay in the browser. Nothing is saved or sent anywhere, and every page is made up.
More to try
- Make a poster showing each command, with your own example.
- Find a word with two meanings. Write a search for each meaning.
- With an adult, try the same search on a real search engine. What is different?