Going Beyond Google

Using the internet for your studies and research

Session Overview

• Hands on workshop

• Search engine pros & cons• Basic and Advanced search tips• Bing and other search engines• Google Scholar & Google Books• Introduction to article linking• Further help

The Internet• The internet has become most people’s main

way of finding information

• However, there are problems….• There is no central index• There is no quality standards or peer review• Not even Google knows all of the pages on the web

• Information can:• be moved or removed without warning• be wrong, out of date and biased• be overwhelming!

Interpreting what you find online

• World Trade Organisation examples - which is real site - how can you tell?

• www.wto.org

• www.worldtradeorganisation.com

• www.gatt.org

Internet Evaluation Criteria• Who is behind a website?

• Contact details• Individual or organisation?

• Where is it based? Domain-check the URLs for an indication:

• .edu, .ac, .gov all educational or governmental sites• .com for commercial sites

• When?• When was the site last updated?

• Why?• Serious or hoax?

• Internet Detective site

All about Google

• How does Google work?• What Google won’t find or tell you!• Google is only 13 years old! Founded

in 1998• Google accounts - using Gmail,

Calendar etc all affect your search results

Google’s Interface

• The interface changes subtly all the time• Depends on where you are in the world, and which

version you went to (google.com or google.co.uk / google.de etc)

• Basic homepage with advanced options available:

• Advanced Search• More search tools• Instant update

Results pages• Indenting of some

results• Clustering of links

within a site• Google Books and

Scholar results in the main Google results

• Cached pages• Different results if

you’re logged in• Twitter feed results

• Some results are seconds old, from twitter and Facebook

• News results (like from the BBC) are often minutes old

• Others can be weeks old.

Other search engines…

• Bing: http://www.bing.com/• Yahoo: http://uk.yahoo.com/• Wolfram Alpha: http://www.wolframalpha.com/

University of Berkeley have a comparison guide.

Meta search engines (search across search engines)

• http://www.metacrawler.com/• http://www.zuula.com/

Bing

• Microsoft – evolved from Live search, MSN

• Yahoo shares Bing’s engine• Social searches• Related searches• Visual search

Google Scholar• http://scholar.google.com • Contains references to:

• peer-reviewed papers and abstracts• theses• books

• From:• academic publishers• professional societies• preprint repositories• universities and other scholarly organisations

• No Approved List of sources

• You can use LSE Article finder to find out about LSE subscriptions. You can add this link when off campus in ‘scholar preferences’

• If you find something on Google that

won’t let you access, check our Library Catalogue for the correct link – using Google may mean that you aren’t recognised as a member of LSE

Google Scholar and LSE

Open Access

• Most universities now havearchives of freely available research available as ‘Open Access’

• Oaister: http://oaister.worldcat.org/ • LSE Research Online:

http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/• Versions & citing issues

Google Books• Google Book Search http://

books.google.com/ • Similar to Amazon’s search inside the book• Some books available in full• Copyright restrictions mean you can only

view small amounts of other books• You can search Google Books direct from

the Library Catalogue

Delicious

• Collection of useful free resources chosen by LSE Library: http://delicious.com/lselibrary

• Use subject tags to refine your search• Important to note full web page details for

your bibliography• Consider using Delicious to file

and arrange your own internetresources

Conclusions

• So much now available on the Internet -the problem is finding quality resources!

• Don’t just rely on Google – the Library has loads of information search engines won’t know about!

• Use the advanced options to focus your search• Learn to get the most out of search engines but

know what they’re not good for!• Think about appropriate citation of

web resources

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