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While Google is nice for a quick search and databases provide a high-level of academic literature, more and more ordinary citizens are doing their own research and they're using social media to do it. Also, many university researchers participate in ongoing discussions with peers and private citizens through social media, and you can search Blogs, Facebook and Twitter just like any other forum for sharing information.
Searching within Blogs
While those who write textbooks and peer-reviewed articles are fairly reputable sources, you might find that bloggers can compile a vast amount of useful research that you will appreciate accessing. To do search of blogs, you should use the Blog Search Engine and utilize some of the handy operators outlined in the Search Engines page.
There are some operators that are especially useful for this time of search. For example some corporate websites might pop up under a normal search, but by using the "site" operator, you can find results for blog posts on particular blog-hosting domains like Wordpress.com or Blogger.com.
People who write blogs often have a very personal interest in the research they choose to do, and that can be very handy because it may be a niche that very few readers care about but which might support a specific aspect of your project or essay. University-level researchers must investigate subject areas that are many times influenced by the funding they receive, but bloggers will many times follow their own personal inquiry into unexpected places.
Also you can use the "link" operator to find any blogs that utilized a reputable source of data to support their claims or to support the primary research they are presenting, as a form of triangulation. For example, you can type in "link:who.int" to find all blogs that have used the World Health Organization as a resource in crafting their blog post. This adds an extra layer of credibility.
Using Hashtags to Search
While Facebook and Twitter may seem from the outside to be forms of social media will little possible gain for research, many of the more tech-savvy researchers choose to give regular updates of their work and interests through these forums. While not finalized and polished research, these information you discover may be an important piece to the puzzle towards completing your own investigation.
The best way to complete a search on Facebook or Twitter is by using a Hashtag. You can creatively guess at different hashtags that have been already put to use, as in the images included here the hashtag used to search was #SpanishCivilWar. A hashtag is any string of characters preceded by a # (hash mark). The hashtag as it's called is a way of organizing content by topic in a forum that doesn't already have a formalized partition of different subject areas. It also is a way of conceptualizing information as being interdisciplinary where only the hashtag can be used to efficiently locate it, and many times a post has more than one hashtag applied.
The website Hashtags.org is a database of various trending hashtags that have been categorized according to popular social media subject areas like Political Uprisings. Finally, hashtags are useful on just about any other type of social media, including Instagram, Google+ and Tumblr.
This also ties in nicely with the Sharing Resources page under Networking which explains the use of various social media sites for distributing information you've found. By labeling your tweets, tagging your Diigo bookmarks, etc. you can clue your peers into all the research you have done. This is a really effective way of saving time.
One of the keys to using and searching with hashtags is to make sure they are unique but not obscure. You want a hashtag that can't be confused with another topic but not so obscure that you'll find only a post or two. For example, Pablo Picasso's painting Guernica is a good starting point for investigating the cultural influences of the Spanish Civil War, but a hashtag of #Picasso would be ineffective given the painter's lifespan, varied work relating to many other topics, etc. Also, using #SpanishCivilWar will find you a lot of posts about a variety of topics concerning this period of time, but not necessarily anything specific to Picasso's involvement. By pairing together BOTH hashtags in one search you can really hone in on Pablo Picasso's involvement in the Spanish Civil War; for example you might type #Picasso #SpanishCivilWar into Twitter.
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