Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Are you getting the most out of Google? Even though it is not always the most
ideal tool for academic research,
it is a powerful tool that is important to know how to effectively use.
Although there are other popular search engines available
such as BING, Ask, and Yahoo, this video
series will highlight a few tricks for making Google work for you,
but first, here are a few things you should know about Google:
Many people feel they are searching everything when using a search engine
like Google,
but did you know that Google only delivers a small
fraction of what's out there? Search engines like Google
only search what is known as the surface web. It is estimated that there
are close to 900 billion pages of information,
most of which are located within specialized databases that Google cannot
find.
This is called the "Deep Web."
Google search results are not necessarily
listed by quality or relevance to your topic,
Google uses something called "page rank" to list results.
The rank of each page on the results list is based
on a number of other pages Google knows about that link to it. The
more pages that link to page X, the higher it's
page rank will be. So it works like a popularity contest.
Scholarly results related to your topic may be less popular
than results for with a commercial or entertainment focus.
A lot of content you find using Google
costs money to view in full, including articles from
academic journals, educational videos, and photos.
The good news is that you can find and use a lot of this type of content for
free at the library.
Since anyone can publish to the Internet,
you should always examine what you find on the Internet
for reliability, balance, and whether or not it's current.
For more information on this, be sure and view
MATC Library's Evaluating Online Resources video.