Learning How to Google

When searching for something using Google, most people simply type in their topic and hope for the best. For small, quick details this may be exactly what they need, but if someone needed to seriously research a topic, the first five links Google brings up will most likely contain inadequate information. Google actually has many different search tools and operators that can help filter out the unhelpful pages and bring up specific one that contain exactly what a researcher may need. These search tools are easily accessible and not hidden at all. They're just a simple click away and have several different options that will quickly narrow down the search results by time, type and even location. Google is already a useful search engine in itself, but its many additional tools and operators make it even better.

After given the chance to try out all of these tools and operators I found that using "AND", "OR", quotation marks, and the minus sign were the most helpful. I was instructed to research the question, "How do democratic and republican positions on the fiscal cliff differ?". I did the first thing most people would do and simply type the question into Google to see what first showed up. Of course there were billions of hits so I began to use the minus sign to take away the things I knew were completely irrelevant such as social media sites or blog entries. I also took out videos because I was looking for articles or simply just text that would explain their different positions. Afterwards, I began using only keywords such as "democrats" or "republicans". Then I realized I needed to put "fiscal cliff" in quotation marks to make sure they were not separated. By slowly adding more keywords and using the "AND" operator I was able to really narrow down the search results. Using the minus sign was a very quick and easy way to get rid of things I wasn't looking for. Google's search operators made filtering through all of its results very easy to do. Learning how to use Google's full potential has now made it a lot easier for me to do research.