University Library Internet searching: getting the best from Outline The Web – the good, the bad and the ugly Search engines and Google Getting the best from Google Quality checking/evaluation and Internet Detective

University Library The Internet & the World Wide Web - the good, the bad and the ugly! The World Wide Web is part of the Internet (International Network of networks). The Web is made up of billions of pages and web sites and is growing rapidly. The Good: wider and easy access to information The Bad & the Ugly: Lack of quality control - no control over who can set up a web site Internet information can be inaccurate, out-of-date, biased and false ‘Invisible web’ - considerable amount of academic material not available in e-form or which cannot by picked up by search engines. The Internet is not a library – there is no librarian!

University Library Search Engines and Search engines are large databases covering billions of web pages. Google is one of many search engines – for examples of other useful search engines see Internet Searching page on University Library web site at Google is one of the largest and most respected and popular search engines. More than just a search engine, includes many services and tools, e.g., news, images, video clips, Google Earth, G-mail etc. Like all search engines there is no control over the quality of the information it indexes. It is easy to get large numbers of results using a search engine, but there are ways of retrieving a more manageable amount of more relevant information.

University Library Getting the best from When searching remember: ●., ; # punctuation is ignored ●Not case sensitive (ASBO / Asbo / asbo) ●There is an implicit AND ●Word stemming - Google returns pages that match variants of your terms – computing/computer… Key functionality: “ “ Use phrase searching (with caution) - to exclude whatever comes after this ~ look for synonyms (netherlands ~guide) * Wildcard (“George * Bush”) Boolean (and /or / not)

University Library Refining and Improving Quality Using Advanced Searching Cut down the number of hits limiting search to specific (domains) to improve precision, e.g. site:ac.uk UK: ac.uk (academic) gov.uk (government) org.uk (organisation) co.uk (company) nhs.uk NHS US: edu (higher education) gov (government agencies) org (organisation) For more information see for full list of country codes, for top level domains, e.g.co.com etc

University Library Tips for effective searching 1: think before you search!  Define your topic and think carefully about your choice of search words / keywords  Think: What are the characteristics of the information I want  Think: How will the information have been created  Think of words and phrases “How to” for practical approaches “a guide to…” Checklist Top  Think of types of documents Directory CV

University Library Tips for effective searching 2 Try alternative words/phrases or spellings, or different combinations of words Be precise! Make grammar work for you Read the Help page! Check that you are using the correct search options - do you need quote marks for phrases (e.g. “war crimes”)? Use limit/filter options to improve your results, e.g. Google’s Advanced Search allows you to limit and filter by site/domain (e.g. ac.uk), date, file format/media type (e.g. PDF files) etc. For further advice – visit

University Library Other Google Services: Google Scholar Claims to “search across many disciplines and sources: peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations” Some say “ its more secretive than North Korea ”

University Library More Google Services… Image – search for images on persons, or topic etc (“zinedine zidane”, “venn diagrams”) Book Search – search for full- text of books (“canterbury tales”). For textbooks use Ebrary (via Library web site) News – search for news stories in the UK and beyond. See also UK Newspapers Online (via Library web site) Video – search videos and upload your own (genre:documentary 9/11) Blog Search – find blogs on a topic, or by author (e.g. islamophobia, Noam Chomsky) Use Advance Search to improve your results

University Library Evaluating Information Check who produced it, when and for whom. For tips for evaluating web information, see Best place to start is Internet Detective - a free online tutorial that will help you develop Internet research skills for your university work –

University Library To Google or Not to Google? Search engines don’t check the quality of the web sites and pages that they index, so whilst they are useful for finding some information, you should not rely on them for finding academic information – use the Digital Library as your first port of call. However, things are changing with Google Scholar ( & Windows Live Academic (