Use quotation marks to search for exact phrases
"healthy eating"
Search by file type
history of Melbourne filetype:pdf
Search by domain (see list below)
gambling legislation site:gov.au
Find the definition of a term
define: plagiarism
Search with a website
gambling site:nytimes.com
For more Google search options, see Settings > Advanced search
Searching by website domain can also help you to decide whether to trust the source.
.gov - a government institution - usually trustworthy
.gov.au - Australian government institution - usually trustworthy
.edu - an educational institution - usually trustworthy
.org - a non-profit organisation - check for bias
.asn - non-commercial organisation - check for bias
.com - commercial site - more likely to be unreliable - evaluate carefully, check facts with another source
.net - network - often used for sites that don't fit in other categories. Evaluate carefully, check facts with another source
Wikipedia can be a good starting point for research - but make sure you use other sources too. As a collaborative encyclopedia, editors from around the world contribute free content on a huge range of subjects. But contributors are anonymous, and pages do get vandalised - so it can be difficult to be know the reliability of articles.
The difficulty level of articles varies - if an article has too much detail, or is difficult to understand, - try Simple English Wikipedia for a simplified version.
If you find information you want to use in an assignment, use the Wikipedia footnotes to take you to the original source, and use this as your reference.
Here are some alternative search engines to google. Try them out and see how different your results are:
Google Scholar [academic research]
Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Bing AI and DALL-E can be used to generate answers to your questions. These technologies are rapidly developing – they may be a useful tool as part of your research, but there are concerns about the use of AI by students. Some problems are listed below – talk to your teacher about whether you can use these tools to assist with your school work.
When submitting school assignments it is important that you present your own work. Submitting AI-generated text as your own work is plagiarism.
There are questions around the reliability of information sourced through AI – responses are designed to be very convincing – but answers may be made up, and are not checked for bias.
There are ethical issues around the use of AI-generated content – Generated AI draws on copyrighted data - books, articles, essays, artworks etc. But permission is not sought from the original creators, and their work is not credited.
Generative AI is a non-recoverable source – the reader of your work cannot use the tool to find the same information later.
If you do use AI to assist with your research it is important that you evaluate the information carefully, and check any facts against another source. Keep a record of what information you find – ideally you should save your own copy of any chat responses. If you use AI generated text or ideas, ensure that you reference it – but note that generative AI is not currently accepted as an appropriate scholarly source – try to locate the original source of the text or ideas, and use this as your reference instead.