When you are multilingual, you are used to the fact that news is being reported differently (from another point of view/perspective) in different countries. Before the Internet, you only knew this, when you were traveling between countries, spoke to friends or relatives on the phone, or were able to get you hands on old media (newspapers or magazines). Since the advent of the Internet and World Wide Web, we are finally able to connect to information and web sites without having to cross any geographic borders or time zones. When news happens or when I am researching a specific topic, I always like to get more than one perspective. I make sure that I search for the topic in Google, Google.de (Google Germany) and Google.com.ar (Google Argentina). Even if you are not a speaker of German or Spanish, you could use Google Translate to translate your keywords, search and then return to translate the search result links back into your language. If you are using Google Chrome, the translator can be directly activated within the browser. Another way of finding sites about a topic, but filter out the results to come only from one specific country, is to search within that country's domain extension. Every country has it's own domain extension. For example, sites from Germany have the ".de" extension. Sites from Mexico use the ".mx" extension. (List of country domain extension) If you would like to search for keywords and only receive results that originate from that specific country (in English), then go to Google Advanced Search.
Enter the keywords (Ex. "Christopher Columbus") and then enter the domain name extension in the "Search within a site or domain". (Ex. ".mx"). The search results will be in English, but will only come from domain names originating in Mexico. How is that for different points of view compared to sites that might originate from ".es" (Spain)? Give it a try. Give your Google searches a global perspective. Teach your students how to search with a global mind.
