Course Outline:
Having problems with Google?  Fed up with it ignoring your search terms and giving you something completely different?  Or confused by irrelevant blog posts from complete strangers appearing in your results?

Personalisation, localisation, social networks and semantic search are used by Google in an attempt to improve relevance but it can all go horribly wrong.  Austria suddenly becomes Australia and your search for goat's cheese turns into identifying different species of buttercups!

Nevertheless, just one really good result on the first page is often enough to persuade us to return again and again.  There are many tricks we can use to make Google give better results and this workshop will look in detail at the options that are currently available to us.

Topics include:
    How Google works
    Recent developments and their impact on search results
    How Google customises your results and can you stop it?
    How to use existing and new features to focus your search and control Google
    How and when to use Google's specialist tools and databases
    What Google is good at and when you should consider alternatives

You will have ample opportunity to experiment and try out the techniques for yourself and Karen will be on hand to help and advise you.  Exercises are provided to help you test out the search features but you are free to explore and try out searches of your own.

Who should attend:
This workshop is suitable for all levels of experience.  The techniques and approaches covered can be applied to all subject areas.

Course Presenter: Karen Blakeman
Karen Blakeman has worked in the information profession since 1978 and became a freelance consultant in 1989. She provides training and consultancy on social and collaborative web tools and searching for and managing information resources.  Karen edits and publishes a monthly electronic newsletter called Tales from the Terminal Room and her blog can be found at www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/.  She is an Honorary Fellow of CILIP and a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).

CILIP's Professional Knowledge and Skills Base (PKSB)
This course supports the following elements of CILIP's PKSB:
3.3 Information retrieval    12.2 Library, information and knowledge technologies

Costs (including lunch and refreshments): UKeiG members £200 + VAT at the current rate; others £245 + VAT at the current rate.

Find out more at
http://www.ukeig.org.uk/trainingevent/making-google-behave-karen-blakeman-0
http://tinyurl.com/nv84ooq

To register your interest, reserve a place, or request further details, please email [log in to unmask]