Sometimes when you're completing an assignment, you'll be required to find articles and information from a credible website.
When you're searching through Google, you're looking through a vast amount of the web, so it'll help you greatly to narrow down your searching by using some of Google's advanced search tools. Below are some helpful search methods for doing some powerful Google searching.
This page will help you understand how to use:
WHO Coronavirus Page
The World Health Organization (WHO) provides information about the coronavirus pandemic worldwide. It provides advice for the public, country-level guidance, information on global research and development regarding COVID-19, and much more.
United Nations COVID-19 Response
The UN here provides a wealth of information about its policies and initiatives in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. It also includes a guide to working together worldwide in order to recover more effectively.
Our World in Data
Developed by Oxford University, Our World in Data aims to aggregate and analyze large worldwide datasets to get a better understanding of policy differences across different regions of the world. Their coronavirus page includes information on how different countries have reacted to the pandemic through their policies, including stay-at-home orders, public information campaigns, school closures, and more.
Just as in a traditional library database, you can use quotation marks to search for a particular phrase in Google. So searching for [cats and dogs] searches for those words and will return any resource that mentions "cats" or "dogs" or "cats and dogs." Instead when you search for the phrase ["cats and dogs"], you will only return resources that include the exact phrase "cats and dogs." When executing this search, notice the difference in the number of results between the two searches:
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Neither search yields a manageable number of results, but notice that [cats and dogs] yields 2.5 billion results while ["cats and dogs"] yields 62 million. The difference is significant.
An example where this would be particularly useful is in searching for a book title. Instead of searching for [long way day], put the title in quotes and search for ["long way down"].
Should you like to find resources through Google for current events, I recommend checking out our Advanced Google Search page. It will help you to find the exact right resources for your assignment by showing you how to limit your searching more effectively. By searching this way, you will become a much more powerful user of Google.
An example of the way that you might use the Advanced Google Search for this class would be to search for information about the coronavirus only on the CDC website with a search such as [coronavirus site:cdc.gov]:
