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Hey Saundra. Can you believe Mr. Smith wants us to have 10 Internet resources in our final paper!
Hi Derrek. No, I can’t. How does he expect us to find 10 good resources online?
Whenever I put something into Google, I get millions of results, and it all looks like junk to me.
I know what you mean. I know what I’m going to be doing with my weekends for the next 5 weeks.
Goodbye social life. It’s going to take forever to wade through all of those sites to find the few good ones. I’ll catch you later.
I wish there were some way to wave a magic wand and make the good results pop up to the top;
then I wouldn’t have to spend so much of my time searching.
You called? S:
Who are you?
I’m the Sorceress of Sources … to the rescue! Answering the call of stressed out students and frazzled faculty anywhere, anytime!
So, if you’re a superhero, where’s your costume?
What do you mean? I’m wearing it! This is pretty snazzy for a librarian. I’m not even wearing a cardigan. Did you notice the British accent?
Okay. So, Sorceress of Sources, how can you possibly help me with Internet Searching?
I’m so glad you asked. Searching the Internet can be a snap if you know some of the “tricks of the trade”
that we librarians use! Whether it is using the Google toolbar or domain searching, these tips will save you time and have
you surfing like a pro! Let me turn this over to my colleague Andrea to show us some pointers on Search Engines. A:
Thanks Sorceress! So, let’s start off with a basic definition of Search Engines so that we are all on the same page.
A search engine is a program that searches for information from a set group of sources,
in our case we are going to look at internet search engines, so web pages are the information, and the entire internet is the source.
The searcher enters keywords into the search engine, and then the program applies certain methods to scan Internet content and bring back
web page results. Although everyone is familiar with Google, there are many different types of search engines out
there, and some are worth mentioning, because each one searches the World Wide Web in a little different way.
One popular alternative is Bing, at www.bing.com.
Another alternative is using a site like Dogpile.com, which is really a metasearch engine.
When you search dogpile.com for something, let’s say pumpkin pie recipes, it will actually go out and search Google, Yahoo and Bing,
three popular Search Engines, and compile the results for you! The results are separated into paid ads at the top and bottom,
and your search results are displayed in the middle of the screen (sandwiched in between the ads).
You can see where the results came from … This one was found on Google, Yahoo and Bing.
And this one says “found exclusively on Google.. What a nice way to save some time, right?
Getting all of your results compiled in one place. We may as well go ahead and talk about those paid ads now and get it out of the way,
because we are going to be seeing them pop up again and again.
They aren’t necessarily EVIL, but they aren’t exactly harmless either.
Search Engines have to make money to survive, right? So, they support themselves through paid advertisements.
Even though these results are presented FIRST, it doesn’t mean they are the most relevant to your search.
Now, if you are searching for pumpkin pie recipes that might not be such a big deal. But if you are searching for medical advice,
or are seeking an unbiased article on a topic, then it gets a little more complicated.
So, all of this is to say, make sure you are very aware of where the ads are displayed on the page and think twice before deeming it
appropriate content. Moving on! Now we all know that most Web research starts at Google, so that’s where we
are heading. Let’s start at the opening screen. I’m a student doing research on kidney disease.
Chances are, many of you would probably get to this screen and just type in Kidney Disease, and hit search.
Now, you can see that there are over 20 million results for kidney disease. Here are those paid ads I was talking about, slightly shaded up at
the top and along the side. And then are results are in the middle.
Just looking at a result can tell you a lot about whether or not the site is worth visiting. First, you have the title of the webpage, and right
under that, is the url, or web address.
If that web address contains a “edu,” .org, or .gov instead of a .com, .biz, or .info, then chances are that the site contains more quality
information that can be trusted and is from a school of education, non-profit organization or government organization.
Usually the first few lines from the description are shown as well.
If you hover just to the right of the title, you will also be able to preview a snapshot of that webpage.
Still, 20 million results is a LOT to sift through. So, we might want to consider using some of the “tricks of the trade” to narrow our search.
Remember how I said that government publications (.gov) are really great resources?
Sometimes they can be a great place to do medical research. You can search JUST government websites by using the ADVANCED
search feature in Google. Now, Google makes you REALLY work for it. They put the ADVANCED SEARCH button all the way down
at the bottom of your search results. Just click that, and then you will see all of the different options you have. Let’s see, we should probably
change this up a bit to be more to our liking. We want the exact phrase Kidney Disease, so let's put that in the exact
phrase. Then way down at the bottom we want to search within a site or domain: .gov so that it will just search any site that contains “.gov” in
the url (or web address). You could use this to search any particular site, such as espn.com or youtube.com.
Notice that you can also use the little plus sign to add date ranges to your search. Let’s say we only pages created within the past year.
Then you have to hit the advanced search button. Now, we are getting a little over 100,000 hits.
Better than 20 million, by far. Still a lot, but I think we will have more quality results. Now, I want you to notice the search bar.
This is how an advanced search looks. You don’t always have to go to the “Advanced Search” to enter this.
You can type in advanced searches yourself if you know the shortcuts.
For example, any time you want to search for an exact phrase, you simply type the phrase in quotation marks.
If you want to search for the song title Love me Tender, you would type in the phrase “love me tender” in quotation marks.
That just tells the search engine to look for those words together, in that exact order.
Similarly, if you want to do a site search, you would type in the word site, followed by a colon, no space, and then the site or domain name.
If you wanted to search for the name Tiger Woods on the site espn.com you would enter it like this: “Tiger Woods” site:espn.com
Now this is still searching within the past year. We could do anytime, and now it is giving us Tiger Woods, espn.com site.
All of these are from espn.com and contain the name Tiger Woods.
Another really great shortcut is the “synonym” shortcut. If you type in the tilde sign “~” (that’s the squigly line just to the left of the
number 1 on most keyboards) before a word, Google will bring back the results for that word, and others like it.
So, if you search for ~kidney disease, you can see that the results are now about 34 million and are including the terms “bladder.” "liver" and
"renal disease." Why would you want to include MORE results? This is a great tool to use when your search is not turning up
enough results or the right types of results and you need to expand your keywords.
Okay, so, now, let me show you one last thing on Google, and this just might impress your socks off mostly because many of you are
going to be shocked you have never noticed it before. Over on the left hand side of the screen is the Google Toolbar.
This thing rocks. Here is where you can limit your search to different formats, for instance, most people know about the Google Image
search, but, you could click on Videos, and, and now you have 15,000 videos about Kidney Disease to choose from. And, now our other
options have changed, and we can choose our video source down here at the bottom. And we could limit it to videomd.com Instead of just
youtube videos, and probably get more quality videos than we would have found oon youtube about kidney disease.
And still have 55 to choose from. If you click on the “More” button, it gives you more options of formats to choose from,
such as Google Books, blogs, and discussions. There is a time designation on the toolbar as well,
so you can search for events that have happened in the past hour, past week, past month, or you can even choose a custom range.
Finally, the last thing I want to talk to you about is knowing how to put together a good search phrase.
You can know all of the fancy tips, tricks and tools the Internet has to offer, but unless you can put together keywords in a meaningful
manner, you aren’t going to be living up to your search potential!
So, here are a few words to the wise on this subject. Use keywords, not full sentences.
And combine them with Boolean operators (yes, that is English). Boolean operators are the words AND, OR
and NOT that you can use to combine keyword phrases to make your searches more specific.
Using the AND term bring back searches that have ALL of the words in every results. Using OR will bring back results that have ANY of the
words in the results. For example, if I search for children AND poetry, ever site Google brings back with have the words children AND poetry
within it. However, if I do a search for children OR poetry, that means that the site may have one, or the other found on the page.
Which means, there will be more potential resutls. The NOT search can be used if you would like to exclude a word from your
searches. For instance, poetry NOT children. In Google, you have to use the minus sign "-"
without a space before a word to indicate the NOT operator. So, if I wanted to do a search for disease but did not want results that included
Kidney disease, I would search for disease and then use the minus sign with no space and then type the word kidney.
This would exclude all results for kidney disease and leave me with a list of other diseases in my results.
What do I mean by all of this? Sure, Google is probably smart enough to come back with some type of meaningful results to
“What are the symptoms, stages, and treatment options for kidney disease?”
However, a much more precise search would boil this down to the main words: symptoms, stages, treatments and kidney disease.
We could combine these into a keyword search that would look something like this:
symptoms AND stages AND treatment AND “kidney disease”.
The results we get back from this should be more focused and we can look at the results list we get ...
here we have kidney disease, syptoms, treatment of ... These results seem to be more focused and we could use our search tools to
the left or advanced searching to narrow down even further if we needed to.
Thanks for watching! I wish I could tell you more, but I don’t want to give away all of my secrets.
But stay tuned for more tutorials in the secrets revealed series! Until then …. Happy Searching!