Evaluating Web Resources

Use these basic principles of Google searching to get better results, more quickly:

Principle 1: Google's search is built to find the most popular websites containing the words in your search. These are often not the sites that contain the most accurate or academic information. Here are some ways to offset this tendency:

• Be very specific about what type of information you want. Add words like: define, statistics, report, research, data, opinion, history, timeline, review, bibliography or peer review to your keywords.
• Try doing a SITE SEARCH. You tell Google exactly what type of site domain you want results to be from. No single domain type is all reliable or all unreliable, however a site search can help you find a slice of the web that you might not normally see, simply because it's not heavily used.
  • Example: mumps statistics site:gov (This search finds the words "mumps" and "statistics" on the same page, and only shows results from websites with .gov at the end.)
  • Here are the major site domains online: .gov = U.S. government | .com = commercial/business | .edu = educational institution | .org = non-profit organization 

Principle 2: Google's search is built to find all the words you type into your search on the same webpage. This makes sense, however sometimes being extra specific about how you want Google to search makes your results much more relevant, without scrolling through dozens to get to what you want. Here are some ways to get precise about what you want Google to find:

• Use QUOTATION MARKS when your keyword is actually a phrase of 2 or more words.
  • Example: "climate change" hurricanes report (This searches the words "climate change" as a phrase, plus "hurricanes" and "report", so in this case we are looking for an official report on any relationship between climate change and hurricanes.)
  • Example: origin quote "be the change you wish to see" (In this search we want to know the origin of the often-repeated phrase "be the change you wish to see". The quotation marks are very helpful because this quote includes many common words that could be ignored by Google's search algorithm.)
• Use the EXCLUSION or MINUS sign to tell Google specific keywords you don't want to see in your results. This is helpful when you run your keyword search and find many results are not relevant. Adding an exclusion word tells Google to not show any results with that word.
  • Example: jets -football (This search is looking for information on jet airplanes, and not Jets the football team.)

Principle 3: Google makes many adjustments to the search results it shows you first, based on its guess of what you're likely to click on. Similar to Principle 1 and favoring popular sites, this isn't often helpful when looking for accurate information for academic work. Here are a few of the adjustments Google does automatically, and how you can take control of what you want to see.

• PROBLEM: Google wants to show you more of the same types of sites you have clicked on in the past. The problem is that we might miss getting a wide variety of views or source types that we need when doing research. How to combat this? Use Google's VERBATIM search: 
  • After running your keyword search, click on "Tools", usually found underneath and to the right of the search box.
  • Then click the "All results" dropdown menu and select "Verbatim". This tells Google you want the search results based only on your keywords, without the skew of favoring sites similar to those you usually view. 
• PROBLEM: Google shows you websites most related to your search terms, but sometimes you need very recent information. What can you do? Use Google's Tools again:
  • After running your keyword search, click on "Tools", usually found underneath and to the right of the search box.
  • Then click "Any time" and select your preferred time period. The presets are: past hour, past 24 hours, past week, past month, and past year. You can also narrow to a period of time in the past with the "custom range" option.

Try out these search tips the next time you're searching for good sources online!

More Google search operators:

In addition to quotation marks for phrase searching, and the minus sign for excluding keywords, here are a few more you might find helpful:

1. ASTERISK (*) or wild card: Use as a placeholder for an unknown word in a phrase search. Example: "*has more caffeine" or dirty harry quote "do * feel lucky" 
2. NEAR (n) or proximity search: Finds search terms within the specified distance of the words. Example: Iowa (5) hospitals (this search finds pages where "Iowa" and "hospitals" appear within 5 words of each other.
3. FILETYPE search: Finds your keywords in the specified file type. Use the file extension as the document type, not the name of the software. Examples: bats iowa filetype:pdf or template mla filetype:doc
4. LINK search: Finds pages that provide a link to the specified URL. Example: link:www.kirkwood.edu will return results of websites that link to www.kirkwood.edu. This could be useful in understanding how well known a site is, and what affiliations the organization might have.
5. RELATED URL search: Finds pages with content similar to the specified URL. Example: related:www.nytimes.com/topics. Google uses its algorithm to return a list of webpages it considers similar to the content on the given URL.

Google's "How Search Works" tutorial

Google has created a quick and fun tutorial where you learn more about how their search works, and how you can customize your search to various needs. 

• How Search Works tutorial