At the recent CIL Conference in DC, I attended librarian/consultant Mary Ellen Bates’ Super Searcher Tips session and I came away with a number of juicy new strategies.

I’ll start with the most important of these discoveries for the K12 gang.

Google’s new site info card appears in your result list as a little grey arrow to the right of the first line, offering a statement of authorship.

We can train kiddos to look for these notes to improve their selections, better understand bias and affiliation, and to help judge credibility.  According to Google’s Inside Search Blog, the feature is based on Google’s Knowledge Graph and appears when a site is widely recognized as notable online, when there is enough information to show or when the content may be handy for you.

Among the other tools Mary Ellen shared:

Social-searcher.com, a search tool for social media, offers both search results and the kind of free analytics I’ve been searching for for while now for @ signs and hashtags across Facebook (100 posts or two weeks), Twitter (two weeks) and Google+  (a year+).   The tool allows you to monitor and better understand activity around names, brands, hashtags, @signs and keywords and explore analytics like sentiment, users, post types, links, and popularity.

The Google Social Search Tool offers and even deeper reach in terms of time (two years) and extend the search to such other platforms Instagram, Linkedin and Pinterest search without logging into Google itself.