Make Google behave: techniques for better results: Karen Blakeman

Venue: Nowgen training rooms, 29 Grafton Street, Manchester M13 9WU

Date: Tuesday, 30 April, 2013 - 09:30 - 16:30

Course Outline: 
Having problems with Google? Fed up with it ignoring your search terms and giving you something completely different? Or confused by irrelevant tweets from complete strangers appearing in your results? Personalisation, localisation, social networks and semantic search are all being 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 in the top five is often enough to persuade us to return to Google again and again. There are many tricks we can use to make Google return better results and this workshop will look in detail at the options that are currently available to us.

Topics will include:
    How Google works
    Recent developments and their impact on search results
    How Google personalises 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. After graduating from Birmingham University with a degree in Biological Sciences she worked at the Colindale Central Public Health Laboratory. She then spent ten years in the pharmaceutical industry before moving to the international management consultancy group Strategic Planning Associates. Karen edits and publishes a monthly, electronic newsletter called Tales from the Terminal Room and her blog can be found at http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/.  She is an Honorary Fellow of CILIP (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals) and a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).

Costs (including lunch and refreshments): 
UKeiG members £190 + VAT at the current rate; others £230 + VAT at the current rate

To register your interest in this meeting, reserve a place, or request further details, please email [log in to unmask]  or see the UKeiG website
http://www.ukeig.org.uk/trainingevent/make-google-behave-techniques-better-results-karen-blakeman

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Sheila Thomas BA MCLIP MWeldI MBCS
Weldasearch Manager
TWI Ltd, Granta Park, CB21 6AL, UK
www.weldasearch.com



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