5 Sure Ways to Find What You Want On The Internet As A Youth Worker
Gathering The Information That You Need, Discarding What You Don’t Need
Hey what’s up fellow youth workers, hope you’re having a “fab” time with your young people. Now we all know that the big world wide web can be a bit “frustrating RIGHT.
Hate it or love it. You can’t live without it, somewhere down the line in your youth work career you have to get on that confusing, frustrating, stressful internet to do your thing.
This could be to search for that new activity centre, residential place, or you could be just looking for youth work educational materials you planned to deliver for your next workshop/training with your colleagues and young people.
Whatever the case it may be, you gotta do what you gotta do right, so you type in the phrase or a word in that search box and press enter “BOOM SHAZAM”. Now you’re faced with a relevant/irrelevant stack of information staring right at your face.
Don’t worry I got this, What you really need to do is just simply know how to refine your search in order to get the results you’re looking for.
So what I’m going to do is show you the 5 sure ways to find what you want on the internet as a youth worker.
Now it might be too basic for some of you “tech savvy” youth workers (Hold on there “matey”… there might be some golden nuggets of information before you go running away), but if you’re not familiar with all this internet business and not that “tech savvy”, then hold on, as you’re in for mind-blowing learning experience.
So let’s dive in and explore the five sure ways you can have a better experience and get the information you need.
1. Know What Your Searching For
Did you know that there are about 625 million active websites which provide information for you? The search engines job is to sort through all the contents to get you the best matching results that you’re searching for.
Now you may have a personal favourite. Such as you may like Google, Bing or Yahoo. Remember this, don’t get fooled by your habit as the search engines are not PERFECT after all there are machines and they do have blind spots.
The most widely used search engines are;
- Google by far has the largest catalogue of pages and contents available
- Bing, on the other hand, tries to narrow down the search for you
- Yahoo is known for news and shopping (If you’re searching for any kind of news then go visit Yahoo)
Now here’s some Golden Nuggets that you can take away if you’re scheming through this article.
If your searching for specific academic articles or materials then you might wanna check out Google Scholar or if you’re looking for statistics and data then Zanran is your best choice for that.
2. Use Specific Keywords In Your Search
Using specific keywords allows you to find the relevant content that you are searching for. Keywords are the terms that you use to find your content on the internet.
Try to keep it specific as possible so that it will help search engines to locate and track the information that you want.
Let me give you an example, say, you are searching for Paul’s residential activity centre. If you typed into the search engine residential activity centre, the results you will get is all the pages that are relevant to the residential activity centre.
However, on the other hand, if you typed in Paul’s residential activity centre for youth will produce concise results relating to your search.
You can even dig a little deeper like if you typed in the location, for example, if you’re searching for someone locally your results will be all the local providers. For example; Paul’s residential activity centre for youth in Devons
3. Keep It Simple
Keep your search very simple don’t use plurals or verbs such as ing -s -ed. One example that comes to mind is rather using services you can use service.
Some of the search engines will have the tendency to stop words in their searches. Some of the words are (in, of, on, but) if you use these you’re likely to get more pages which may not be relevant to your initial search.
So keep this in mind KEEP IT VERY SIMPLE
4. Make Use Of Quotation Marks
Use of quotation marks allows the search engine to be more specific to your keyword or phrase you’re using in the search engine.
Now if the term your using is a single like youth work then using quotation marks will eliminate any variations. So if you typed in “youth work” you will get specific content based on that search word. Try it yourself and see.
WhenI typed in the word “youth work” I got results of what is youth work see below:
5. Don’t Use unhelpful Words
What do I mean by unhelpful words? Try to avoid hyphens/symbols/ small dash/minus signs as this will exclude it from the search engines and you will not get the results you were searching for.
Just imagine you’re looking to find out about some educational materials on how to raise self-esteem for you’re next workshop.
So if you typed into the search engine how to raise – self-esteem. The search engine will exclude the word related to self-esteem.
Use this to exclude words that you’re not searching for will help you to minimise clutter when you’re searching next time online.
So there you go my 5 sure ways to find what you want on the internet as a youth worker. That wasn’t bad was it, easy as a having a pie & marsh.
So next time you’re on the internet be sure to use the tips to do your research or if you’re just browsing, These tips will help you to become more efficient and save you a lot of time and energy.
Leave your comments below if you enjoyed this blog. If you have any suggestions email me on info@youthworknews.com
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