Looking forward to the future of journalism

A handy tool for journalists: Stabilize your shaky smartphone videos with Google’s photo app

Screen Grab of Google Video

Google quietly unveiled a new video stabilization feature in its Google Photos app a few months ago and it’s amazing. I discovered the usefulness of this feature when I edited video clips of our epic annual family road trip to Colorado. In between time-lapse videos of the drive, I added highlights of the main stops … Read more

New search tips for 2014 from Google research scientist Daniel Russell

I couldn’t attend the 2014 Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in San Francisco this year. But thankfully, Google researcher Daniel Russell was there. He gave another excellent presentation about search-engine strategies and posted his advice online. As the Uber Tech Lead at Google, Dan studies how people search the web. He started sharing little-known search … Read more

More awesome search tips from Google expert Daniel Russell, with real-world examples

Daniel Russell, research master at Google
Daniel Russell, research master at Google
Daniel Russell, research master at Google

When a research scientist at Google offers to show you how to unlock the full potential of the powerful search engine, you pay attention.

Last year Daniel Russell spoke at the Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in Boston. Dan showed us search techniques that can make anyone a better researcher. Some tips I already knew. Others I thought I understood but didn’t. And some I had no idea existed.

I thought Dan’s talk was eye-opening — and others had the same reaction. My post about his presentation last year was widely shared, so there’s enormous interest to learn more about how Google works and how to use it effectively.

You gotta know a little bit about how to make Google dance. This is all mother’s milk for investigative reporters.”

Since that conference a year ago, Dan began offering online classes. I’ve had a year to practice many of these techniques. And about a week ago, Dan spoke again at the IRE conference in San Antonio with even more advice.

“You gotta know a little bit about how to make Google dance,” Dan said at his panel, Digging in with Google. “This is all mother’s milk for investigative reporters.”

I thought it’d be a good idea to compile some of the interesting new techniques, and revisit tips Dan discussed last year with some real-world examples of how journalists used them in actual news stories. Many of these methods also work on other search engines, such as Yahoo! and Bing.

These tips are for journalists, researchers, librarians and anyone else who wants to learn new ways to find information. Google will never replace the importance of shoe-leather reporting — knocking on doors and talking to real people. But Google can help reporters find the right doors to knock on and reveal surprising details about the people you’re talking to. Knowing how to find obscure information on the Internet is a vital skill for any journalist.

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Become a Google power searcher: Google is now offering free search lessons online

Wow, a lot of people are very, very eager to learn how to search the web more effectively. My post about Daniel Russell’s awesome Google search techniques has generated a ton of traffic and great reactions. And today we learn that Google is going to start offering lessons to people to become power searchers. Course … Read more

How to solve impossible problems: Daniel Russell’s awesome Google search techniques

Dan Russell, Google

Daniel Russell stood in front of a crowd of investigative journalists in Boston last week and showed us this picture of a random skyscraper in an unknown city: Russell posed a riddle: What’s the phone number of the office where this picture was snapped? Let that sink in. He wasn’t asking for a phone number … Read more

Check out every insurance claim filed against the city of San Antonio

Advanced Google search results for the city of San Antonio

What happens when you’re hit by a city vehicle and file an insurance claim against San Antonio? Now you can find out by searching a database that tracks every claim filed against the city in the past decade. I stumbled across this story by using Google’s advanced search options. Google lets you search specific websites … Read more

Remembering the Alamo — and the media’s role in its fate

The Alamo, photo by Nan Palmero

Reading Scott Huddleston’s latest update about the turmoil at the Alamo, I wondered how many people remember the roots of the problem and why the state of Texas got involved in the first place. I doubt casual readers know Scott deserves some of the credit for the changes — or the blame, depending on how … Read more

Express-News joins Google Fast Flip

Google announced it added more news sources to its Fast Flip experiment, and the San Antonio Express-News is now flippable. Fast Flip is part of Google’s re-imagining of how readers find and consume news. Google takes snapshots of a publisher’s stories or blog posts. You can flip through pages like a magazine until something catches … Read more