I love using Google. I think one can find amazing and reliable information. That said, you need to be aware how to filter out that information that is not easily recognizable as being reliable. You have learned some of these strategies in your class already. Pay attention to Authority (who wrote or published the information), Currency (is it old or outdated?), and the Point of View (is it biased?),
See the sample Google searches below. If you were to copy/paste the strategy into a Google search bar, you will probably get different results (based on search algorithms), but you will see how the search changes as you add restrictors.
The main restrictors would be quotation marks for exact phrases (our Los Rios databases uses this, too) and domain restrictors (is it an educational site, an organization, a government agency?)
On a research paper, you want to avoid the dot.com sites.
With Google Advanced Search you can easily use tools such as domain limiters (edu, gov, org). You can also type in an advanced search directly into the Google search box. See examples below.
|
Google Search
|
Results (3/10/20) |
Search Strategies |
|---|---|---|
|
power of language |
2.7 trillion! |
Default Boolean AND search (it looks at the word power AND the word language ANYWHERE). |
|
"power of language" |
26.9 million |
The quotation marks designate that the search is an EXACT PHRASE |
|
intitle:"power of language" |
13,500 |
The phrase must be in the title. |
|
intitle:"power of language" inurl:npr |
7 |
"power of language" would be in the title and the site (URL) will be NPR |
|
intitle:"power of language" site:.edu |
412 |
Site must be an educational institution. |
|
"power of language" ethnicity site:.edu |
323,000 |
The word ethnicity is added to the academic site search |
|
"power of language" site:.edu filetype:pdf |
293,000 |
Site must be a pdf from an educational institution. You might also try something like filetype:ppt |