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:
Once you understand these concepts, try visiting the "Suggested Websites" tab and try these techniques out!
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"].
The site: limiter is incredibly helpful if you're looking for a particular type of source for your research. Sometimes, it might be helpful to get an understanding of the US government's coverage of a topic or you might like to see just what the New York Times is saying about something.
For example, if you'd like to look at the New York Times' coverage of the Black Live Matter movement, you can search ["Black Lives Matter" site:nytimes.com]:
Suggested sites for this class include:
