Does this scenario sound familiar? You are writing a biography of former Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau for Social Studies class. You are still in the research phase of your project. You decide it’s time to “Google it.” You pull up the search engine and enter the following query into the search box:
pierre trudeau
The results? Over 3.5 million hits. Just looking at the first page of results, there is a Wikipedia entry, a biography from Biography.com, a podcast from the CBC, two articles about Trudeau’s health problems in later life, a biography from Canada Online and an article about Trudeau’s reclusive daughter. How do you know which of these articles will be useful and reliable? The answer: With 3.5 million results, it will be very hard to find the most useful and reliable sources of information. Is there a way to improve your search to turn up better results? The answer: YES!
As the scenario above illustrates, a poor search generates tons of mostly useless results. With a few minor tweaks, you will be able to get much better results.
pierre trudeau
The results? Over 3.5 million hits. Just looking at the first page of results, there is a Wikipedia entry, a biography from Biography.com, a podcast from the CBC, two articles about Trudeau’s health problems in later life, a biography from Canada Online and an article about Trudeau’s reclusive daughter. How do you know which of these articles will be useful and reliable? The answer: With 3.5 million results, it will be very hard to find the most useful and reliable sources of information. Is there a way to improve your search to turn up better results? The answer: YES!
As the scenario above illustrates, a poor search generates tons of mostly useless results. With a few minor tweaks, you will be able to get much better results.
How to do a proper search:
- Choose your search terms carefully.
- Leave out non-essential words like ‘the,’ ‘of,’ ‘and,’ ‘or,’ ‘in,’ etc.
- Use quotation marks around words that should appear together. (e.g. “pierre trudeau,” “prime minister”)
- Use the plus sign for multiple key words if you are only interested in results that have ALL of those words (e.g. Canada + government + constitution)
- Use a minus sign in front of words that you DO NOT want to appear in your search results (e.g. Whistler -Olympics)
For an improved search on Pierre Trudeau, you may now have realized that you are only interested in biographical information from his time as prime minister, and you are not interested in his health struggles with cancer or dementia. You may improve your search by entering the following search terms into Google:
“pierre trudeau” + biography + “prime minister” –cancer –dementia
You now have less than 60 000 results to contend with. It’s still a lot, but it is much more manageable. How do you proceed from here? Use the following tips to help you identify the best results from your search.
Tips for sifting through search results:
- Typically the top results are from websites that contain the largest number of references to your search terms, so these are usually a good place to start. BUT BEWARE, some search engines, like Google, allow websites to pay to appear at the top of the results list, so carefully evaluate these top sites for reliability and suitability before you start taking notes.
- Check out the URLs listed with the results. They can give some clue as to whether or not a site may be useful to you. For example, in our Trudeau search results we can clearly see links to two Canadian government websites as well as the Canadian Encyclopedia mixed in with links to Canada Online and a Pierre Trudeau website on the free web hosting service, clevernet. I would favour the first three results knowing, from previous experience, that those websites are more reliable.
- Read the title of each result. This can sometimes give you a sense of what the article may be about, which can help you decide if the information on the site itself will be useful.
- Read through the blurb that comes beneath the title. It will often show your search terms in bold type. Reading these few sentences and seeing where and how often your search terms appear can also help you figure out if the site will be useful.
- Don’t be afraid to look at results beyond the first page, especially for popular topics that will generate many results even with very specific search terms. A site that doesn’t appear on the first page may still have plenty of useful information. It may simply be newer or less popular than some of the top results.
- If you go through the first few results and find that they are not as helpful as you would like them to be, try refining your search even further by adding more search terms.
- If you find that your search has produced very few results, you may need to broaden your search by removing some search terms and trying again.