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Hey, Google! Let's be friends!
Google is sort of like Photoshop or Microsoft Excel—most people know the basics of how to use it and pull up a page or two, but those 3 Google strategies you know are the tip of the iceberg. The Google waters run deep. Photoshop can do way more than just crop pictures (Have you seen a magazine cover recently?) and Excel can do way more than make a list. Google is the same way.
When it comes to scouring the interwebs, explorer, you are yet a young grasshopper. Your training is incomplete. For instance, did you know that Google Scholar is a thing? Yep, it's a thing. There are now mini-Googles inside the Google. Yeah, it kind of blew my mind, too. And there is so, so much more.
Today, we start from the beginning, but not like AltaVista-circa-1998-beginning. I meant the beginning of real online searching, which basically means Google. Sorry, AltaVista. You were great while you lasted. Today, we learn Google-Fu.
READING: HOW TO USE GOOGLE SEARCH MORE EFFECTIVELY
Let us begin at the beginning, young padawan. Check out the handy the video/article below and take a few notes!
READING: LEARNING THE WAYS OF GOOGLE-FU
Imagine for a second that the year is 1990. The world's first search engine has just been born. It's a tiny program named Archie that searched through the internet's files manually because that's how tiny the internet was.
To write a research paper in 1990, we would have gone to an actual, physical library, complete with ladies wearing oversized bifocals. We would have used the Dewey Decimal System to find the shelving area for our topic. Alternatively, we could have looked through the card catalog, which was basically like Indiana Jones decoding a treasure map, except not fun or glamorous. Then, we would have gathered up a bunch of heavy books and sat down to read them. It wasn't easy.
As we found, the Rolodex-style card catalog has essentially gone the way of the dinosaur thanks to Google. We've got some Google-Fu under our belts, and we know how to manipulate our searches to limit or specify our results, but we also have to search for the right terms in the first place.
Suppose the questions we want answered sound like this:
How did the British Empire affect the natural environment over time? Was the British Empire environmentally detrimental, or helpful? What were the major natural resources that the growth of the Empire consumed?
How would we search for answers? We could (1) stick the whole question in the search bar as though Google were a Magic 8 ball and await an answer. That is an option. Alternatively, we can (2) grab some keywords. Here's how those two searches would compare:
Search One:
Search Two:
The first search gets a top result from Wikipedia—not exactly a reliable resource (crowd-sourced sources are kind of sketchy). Then there's more Wikipedia, and some discussion threads from an academic group called H-Net. It's a B- kind of search.
The second search starts with an academic article on recent research on the environmental history of the British Empire. Bingo. Then there's an Oxford companion book on the same subject, another essay, and only then do we hit Wiki. I'd give that an A-.
If we can first master the essential phrasing, we can add our Google-fu to make it better. We've got that covered with the last lesson where we focused on Google-specific search operators, but today, we're covering how to get better searches from non-Google sources (yes, they do exist).
Here are some additional rules to add to the cheat sheet from the last lesson, with lovely examples:
AND. When you stick AND in the middle of a search, it tells the search engine you want only results that have this word AND this word. In Google, we used a blank space. Not so for other search engines:
British empire AND environment AND history
OR. OR is a way to broaden your searches. It tells the search engine that you'll take results that have this word OR this word. Like so:
environment OR nature
NOT. This is an especially useful one. It's a way of excluding certain terms from your results. So, if you were trying to look up Hawaiian history, but you kept getting touristy sites in your results, you would add NOT to the end of your search:
hawaii history NOT tourism NOT travel NOT vacation
NEAR. This one's a little more tricksy. It tells the search engine that you want your two terms to be within 10 words of each other. It can help if you've got two pretty disparate terms that you're trying to stick together, like atomic physics and Christianity. Goes like this:
atomic AND physics NEAR christianity
Switching gears for a second, we already covered a ton of punctuation-type operators yesterday, right? Now, let's add another cool one today: the question mark (?). This works a lot like the asterisk, except there's only one letter that's the wild card. Like this:
wom?n finds results for women and woman.
One last FYI: Google tailors its search results based on your browsing history, so it's best for general research if you sign out of your Google account.
Okay, let's pause. These are the basic concepts of Boolean searching, and it's pretty important to get the logic of them. Check out the site below for reference.
Using Digital Searches to Get Physical Stuff
Using Digital Searches to Get Physical Stuff
So far in this lesson, I've been assuming that you want to use Google or other search engines to find online sources. Online sources are convenient, plentiful, and generally deserving of a froyo and/or a chorus of angels. But once you actually dig in to your research, there's going to come a time when you need print sources.
Yep, I'm talking about books. You won't need them because print sources are just inherently, magically better than digital ones—it's just that not everything you need is likely to be conveniently online for you. Smarty pants academics still publish most of their brilliant research in books or articles.
This means libraries, my young travelers. Luckily, all those dinosaur card catalogs are now usually online, but they still need searching. Also luckily, all your digital searching skills also apply to library search engines, at least generally speaking. If you're unsure, there's often a FAQ part of the library website that mentions whether or not it's a Boolean system.
This is an example of a Boolean search in a public library system. Notice that the first three are spot-on based on our search (information about nurses during World War II). You can think of libraries as curated collections of information, while the internet is just a jumble of everything all at once (or maybe it's like the difference between an art gallery and Etsy).
Don't imagine that you're limited to the print sources that happen to be locally available in your high school or public library, though. Most libraries have a system called "Interlibrary Loan," or ILL, which lets you borrow a book from another public institution even if it's hundreds of miles away.
So how do you know what books other libraries have? WorldCat. WorldCat is basically a list of everything that's ever been published. Literally. Plus, it can tell you which libraries have copies of the book you're looking for. Nifty, right? I think so.
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