What Do You Want to Know?

The first step to using a search engine effectively is knowing what you’re looking for. Let’s say you’re working on a research project for social studies about World War II. If you type into Google “World War II”, you’re going to get mostly encyclopedia articles and general overviews of the time period. That’s a good place to start, but if your focus is on one specific battle, say the attack on Pearl Harbor, you’ll be spending most of your time reading information that isn’t relevant. 

To refine your search, you must first determine what exactly you want to know. The easiest part is changing your search from “World War II” to “Attack on Pearl Harbor”. This will narrow your results to this single event, but you still may see some unreliable results. The next step is knowing how to weed those out.

Relevant vs Irrelevant Search Results

Once you have a better phrase for the search engine, you need to review the results to see what is useful to you. When reviewing search results, focus on the title and snippet descriptions, looking for keywords and phrases that directly relate to your research question. Pay attention to the website's URL and domain; reputable sources like educational institutions (.edu) or government websites (.gov) are often more reliable. If a result seems off-topic or contains information that doesn't align with your needs, it's likely irrelevant and should be skipped.

For example, a Google search of “Pearl Harbor” yields two different Wikipedia articles. One is titled Attack on Pearl Harbor with the description stating “a surprise military strike by the Empire of Japan on the United States Pacific Fleet at its naval base at Pearl Harbor on Oahu, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941”. The second is titled Pearl Harbor (film) and the description states “Starring Ben Affleck, Kate Beckinsale, Josh Hartnett, Cuba Gooding Jr., Tom Sizemore, Jon Voight, Colm Feore, and Alec Baldwin, the film features a heavily…” Think - which one is more helpful for your research project?

Getting More Specific

There are a number of ways to refine your search to get more specific results. Some options are part of the search phrase itself, others are filters applied after running the search. To refine the search criteria, use what are called Boolean operators. These are short words in all caps that help the search engine know what you want it to look for. Here are some ways to refine your search criteria using Boolean operators:

• AND - Use to ensure all your keywords are included in the search. For example, “World War II AND Pearl Harbor” will help remove irrelevant results about tourism. Most search engines interpret a space between words as an AND operator.

• OR - This will broaden your search to results that include any of the specific keywords, rather than all of them. For example, “Pearl Harbor OR Japan OR December 7th 1941” will widen your results.

• NOT - This will exclude results that contain a specific keyword. In Google, use the minus (-) symbol. For example, “Jaguar -car” will give you only results about the animal, not the car dealership.

• Quotation marks - If you want your search results to contain a specific phrase, use quotation marks to search the phrase as a whole.

Once you have your list of results, you can then filter it more using the “Tools” drop down near the right side of the screen. Check out the Advanced Search for even more options.