A little bit of
understanding can't hurt.
What are the basic skills involved in the search process? One of the
central skills is being able to distinguish between the different types
of search tools available, and then choosing the best one for the job at
hand. After that, of course, it's important to know how to use these tools,
and how to relate to the results that they produce. In other words, one
should know how to enter a search term into a search engine, and where
to click on the list of results that appears in order to get to the desired
information, and to understand the structure of a hierarchical index in
order to know how to navigate within one until one gets to the desired
category and finds the results. That may read like a rather daunting list
of skills (the sort that needs an expert teacher and a number of hours
to study, but if the truth be told, they really aren't very complicated
and can be acquired quite easily. Be that as it may, often but I have to
devote a couple of hours simply trying to convince my students that the
term "search engine" doesn't correctly categorize all the available search
tools.