Transcript Demystifying the law library - Anglia Ruskin University

Internet searching: getting the best
from
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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
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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
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Internet information can be inaccurate, out-of-date,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!
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Search Engines and
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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
http://libweb.anglia.ac.uk/net/net.htm
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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.
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Getting the best from
When searching remember:
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. , ; ? @ # 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)
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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)
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For more information see
www.iana.org/cctld/cctld-whois.htm for
full list of country codes,
http://www.icann.org/tlds/ for top level
domains, e.g .co .com etc
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
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Tips for effective searching 2
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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
http://libweb.anglia.ac.uk/net/tips.htm
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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”
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More Google Services…
Image – search for images on
persons, or topic etc (“zinedine
zidane”, “venn diagrams”)
Book Search – search for fulltext 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
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Evaluating Information
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Check who produced it, when and for
whom.
For tips for evaluating web information,
see
http://libweb.anglia.ac.uk/net/nethelp.htm
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Best place to start is Internet Detective a free online tutorial that will help you
develop Internet research skills for your
university work –
http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/detective/
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To Google or Not to Google?
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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 (http://scholar.google.com/) &
Windows Live Academic
(http://academic.live.com/)
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