Teaching Your Kids the Science of the Search Engine Search
May 17 2011

Following is a guest post by Taylor Laurents, a twenty something freelance writer from Lincoln, NE. She was bitten early by the entrepreneurial bug, selling Girl Scout cookies like many young girls, and hopes one day to run her own business and be her own boss.

Teaching Your Kids the Science of the Search Engine Search

It sounds like probably the most boring subject you could mention to your child, but perhaps nothing more vital to their well being is so easily bypassed during dinner table discussion than lessons on how to initiate a productive search for something on the Internet.

Think about it – we teach our kids to grasp other forms of information location: alphabetically, by way of reference, through the Dewey Decimal System, et cetera. But when it comes to how to use search engines effectively, undoubtedly the tool our children will be utilizing the most to get information, we seem to be in a kind of disinterested time warp, not nearly as focused on making sure our kids know how to execute proper research on the Internet. This is a generational gulf that needs to be crossed.

Children who use the Internet to garner information who don’t know how search engine optimization works, and we’re just talking the basic understanding of it, are at risk for falling for the deceitful tactics many online enterprises use to perpetuate desired information. For instance if your child wanted to do a research paper on the fat content of McDonalds hamburgers versus home made and wasn’t aware that typing “McDonalds fat content” would bring up McDonalds-sponsored websites, they could be easily manipulated into submitting a paper with inaccurate information, and worse carrying that inaccurate information in their head for the rest of their lives.

The business behind search engine results is really not that difficult to get across to the mind of a child. If your kid can grasp how your own small business works then the moneymaking methods of search engines shouldn’t be hard. If you have a problem relating the issue to your child though, try and focus their intention on the power of “number one”: Number one in line gets lunch first, picks the first playground toy, et cetera. If they can understand why a company would view being in first place on a search engine as a top priority, they’ll begin to understand.

The information that encompasses all of human knowledge is one day, if not already, going to be accessed exclusively through the Internet. “Don’t be evil” is the self-guiding model of search engine ethics, but more times than not it’s the good intentions by companies trying to be found that leads to the propagation of disinformation, which can easily find its way into the heads of our kids if we don’t give them a heads up first.

Note: I was compensated to review, edit and post this article.

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