DA125 Hiatt

The internet has lots of information - some of it is great and some of it not so much. When using information (whether it is found on the open web or in a library database) it's your responsibility to make sure it's credible. This is something that librarians can help you figure out.

On this page you can find some tips and tricks for better searching online. Once you've found information, make sure to look at the Evaluating sources page to check credibility.

The top tricks I recommend are:

• Search using keywords only, not sentences. This focuses the search on what you really want to know.
• The "site:" technique below is a great way to make sure you are getting the most credible information. For medical fields that is often sites that have .gov (where you find NIH and other public grant money research). It may also include .org. Check out information about URL suffixes on the Evaluating sources page.

We all use it - now let's learn to use it better! Improve your Googling skills to save time and make it easier to identify better sources of information.

Quotation marks

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• Use quotation marks around your search terms to search for the words in the exact order you would like, instead of separately.

intitle:

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• Use intitle: to retrieve webpages with your keywords in the title of the webpage

site:

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• Use site:. to retrieve webpages from URLs in the domain (.gov, .edu, .org) you specify.  

- (a hyphen or minus sign) 

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• Use - (a hyphen or minus sign) in front of words to exclude them from your search results.

OR

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  In the above example, Google will find results that include (election AND fraud) and (voter AND fraud).
• Use OR in between words to have either or both of the words included in your search results. OR must be capitalized. This is a good way to search for synonyms.

filetype:

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• Use filetype: to retrieve specific types of files (instead of html webpages). Works for finding most file types.

Combine strategies

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• Use several strategies at once for very specific results.