SOCY 122: Introduction to Academic Library Research

In this section we will briefly examine some of the features of web search engines that allow you to construct more effective searches, and we will look at ways of finding quality websites for your research. Critically evaluating the information you find on the Web is absolutely essential; anyone with access to a computer can make a website and content is usually unmonitored. We will look at the criteria for evaluating sources, including websites, in the next module, Using Information.

In Module 4: Search Strategies, we looked at search techniques for constructing an effective search in a library database. You can apply some of these same search techniques when you are using a search engine - namely:

• choose effective keywords: use the most important words (and synonyms) that reflect your topic
• connect keywords with Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) if supported by the search engine
• quotes: use quotation marks to indicate a phrase; there can be additional words before or after the phrase, but the phrase will always stay together in the results

Google, like Omni and other library databases covered in this tutorial, also supports Boolean operators.  Here is Google's Advanced Search:

• All these words is equivalent to "AND" (in other words, search terms are automatically "ANDed" together)
• This exact word or phrase is the phrase search
• Any of these words is equivalent to "OR"
• None of these words is equivalent to "NOT"

Just as scholarly article databases and Omni offer ways to narrow one's search results, Google Advanced Search also offers ways to limit search results by language, last time the page was updated, to specific domains, and where one's search terms must appear (such as in the title of the page or the text of the page):