GETTING THE MOST OUT OF GOOGLE
While perusing the Internet this weekend, I came across a fantastic infographic from collegehack.com. Most of our students when they research, if not taught to or told to use the library database and search engine, immediately head off to Google. Too many times they simply type in a couple words and his search, or as I have seen too many times they type in verbatim from the assignment the question they need to answer or they will type a question as though they were asking a friend for an answer.
Because of Google’s algorithm, the results with these types of searches can often yield a great deal of irrelevant information and sometimes information from disreputable or questionable sources. How do you avoid this?
Did you know that you can:
- Search only specific sources? (use site:)
- Search for related terms (i.e. college, university, higher education) at the same time? (use a ~)
- Find only specific file types, such as a .pdf? (use filetype:)
- Get results from only specific years or dates? (set up a range search)
- ONLY search scholarly, peer-reviewed journals? (use Google Scholar)
These tips and many more can be found in the infographic below. Either print as a poster or pull what you need for an instruction sheet or cheat sheet for students. Don’t forget to include the additional search tools you can use right from the Google search bar like:
- Define
- Calculator
- Time & Unit Conversion
- Translator
Also included are keyboard shortcuts that are valuable when navigating searches or various tabs and windows and for taking screenshots for trouble shooting or displaying search results of screens for presentations later.
Just make sure that if you do use this graphic later, please please please follow their Creative Commons copyright requests!
NJBiblio 