Omnivorous Surfer: Google Search's Wonder Wheel

Google Search's Wonder Wheel

Posted in Labels: Education, Google, search | at 7:33 AM

Have your students...or you...ever had difficulty narrowing down searches to get the right results? Sometimes they simply can't get the right combination of words, perhaps because their vocabularies are limited and they don't know them or because they aren't using the "right" synonym for one or more of the terms. Google has a search tool that lets you begin with a general term and then narrow it down step-by-step. It's the Wonder Wheel. You'll find it in the left pane of a Google search window under "More Search Tools."

Rather than try to describe it, I'll use images to demonstrate. Below are the results of a Google search for "elephant." You can see the wheel at the left with the search results at the right. (The image is small, but it will open full size if you click on it.)

If I click on the "elephant habitat" spoke, Google changes the search to "elephant habitat" and creates a new wheel with more options for narrowing the search, as shown below.

You can also narrow down results by looking at the bottom of standard Google search results for related searches; alternatively, you can choose "Related Searches" from "More Search Tools," which will place them at the top of the page. I especially like this graphic method for students, though. It makes it easy to see relationships and gets them used to mapping (or is familiar to them if they are already used to mapping).

For a comparison of the two tools, check these out:

Wonder Wheel