Google Research Guide
From Engineering Wiki
Advanced Google Researching
Why do we need this guide? Well there are better ways to run research in Google that can give you a better shot at finding good quality resources. So why do this? Well lets just say that we were working on a project that needed information about the construction of a leverage machine for mechanical engineering and that we wanted related patents or standards. It is easy enough to search for these kinds of things as shown here:
As you can see from my search though we have 60,300 results. How can you tell which web page in 60,300 results is useful and good material? That would involve a lot of digging. In addition how did the first article get there? There are two main ways that articles gain precedence in Google. The first is that Google will go through with a page ranking algorithm and count how many times a web-page has been linked to. The more web-links you have the higher your page goes. The second is through advertising so someone pays to raise where their page falls in the hierarchy. Since there is a process to this it would be easy for someone to cheat and push their page up to the highest spot. As such you need to check and verify that a web-page you are looking at using has been created by someone who has neutral bias and good information. It also helps to be able to tell who created the page.
Also about that first web-page that was returned ... it is a Wiki page. Wiki pages can be used to gain a general understanding of a topic but they should not count as primary resources. The reason for this is that anyone can create a Wiki page. It does not matter if they actually have the qualifications or the knowledge about the topic that they are writing about.
Selecting Google Advanced Search
So instead of using the basic Google search you should use the Advanced Search you can select it as shown:
Google Advanced Search Component Breakdown
- This shows where your search gets built as you add terms to the different boxes below.
- In this box you place terms that you want to show up in all of the search. They are required.
- In this box you place exact phrases
- In these boxes you put multiple items you want information about. So if you want information about two different topics then you would put them here.
- This is the second box for the OR style search
- This is where you specify the domain of the website you want to search in. It is the most useful search restriction in that you can specify specific web domains such as www.mit.edu (MIT) or companies www.apple.com. You can also search broadly by subject for items found on different types of webpages: business (.com, .net), education (.edu), government (.gov), other countries (Britain .ac.uk).
- This is where you can set additional restrictions such as times, dates, etc. The date restriction is very useful for allowing you to look at very current information. You can actually set the date restriction so it gives you information from the past 24 hours, week, month and year.
- If you are getting a lot of web-pages about a specific topic and you do not want to see any more results from that topic you can enter that word or phrase here and it will remove it from your results.
Final Results
