ARIJ Network – Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism – in cooperation with the Google News Initiative, held a virtual training workshop on the basics of searching for images and information on search engines and social media websites.

Samya Ayish, the training fellow at the Google News Initiative in the Middle East and North Africa provided a set of tips and tools to use to improve the quality of online searching, and to access the information that journalists need for their work, and to try to build a better future for journalistic work.

At the beginning of the workshop, Ayish focused on reviewing some tools that she called “search enhancements” in order to find better results for searches, and she gave examples for using these tools. One of those examples is using quotation marks while searching for keywords. The quotation marks can help in tracking cases of plagiarism and intellectual property theft of written content on the Internet, which can be later reported to Google after identifying them.

She also reviewed some of the features provided by “Google Trends”, including understanding the users’ search behavior when searching for a specific topic, identifying the words used the most when searching, identifying frequent questions in Google searches, comparing two specific topics or two keywords and figuring out which one is searched the most, as well as knowing which topics to focus on when working with a specific situation.

In this workshop that lasted 100 minutes, Ayish finally focused on the methods of searching for images on Google and other search engines, and identified the importance of these methods in verifying the authenticity of the published images with the ability to track down the date and place of publication.

Finally, Ayish focused on some advanced searching tools on social media websites like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, and highlighted their significance as important sources of information.

The participants interacted with Ayish in the workshop and asked a set of questions, which the trainer answered extensively and provided examples for.

The number of participants in the workshop reached over 550 journalists on Zoom and Facebook Live, while the number of views on the recorded live broadcast on the ARIJ Facebook page reached over four thousand views in the first few hours after the training was over.