Remote comment on Searchblog: How to Search

John Battelle's comments seem to be broken - I get sent here when I try to post one. So here's the comment I was trying to post in response to this post from John:

I'm surprised that you don't mention in this post another interesting thing that you said in Mountain View last night - namely that you're teaching search at your kids' school. While that is the elementary facet of this problem, it's the same problem, and I am curious for your thoughts or anecdotes from that experience.

I can imagine a new version of "media studies" - the sort of classes that help you, as a viewer, deconstruct the staging, editing, and filming that goes into producting a TV news blurb, and help you to understand its relationship to fact and truth. Seeing inside the sausage factory of news production can help us make informed decisions about how to evaluate its product, and with search, that same kind of informed decision seems critical to a) getting what we want out of search and b) knowing what *to* want, and what to expect, from a search result.