8.1: Google

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Google is a terrific tool for locating information across the more than 30 Trillion web pages it indexes. What can you expect to find with a Google search, and what is likely to be excluded? While Google indexes and connects you to a massive amount of information, it does not necessarily own the content it indexes. Books and scholarly journals are typically not free, and so Google is a poor way to find these types of sources. More exactly, Google may lead to you useful book and article citations, but is unlikely to give you full access to those books or articles. Still, Google can be useful for gaining a global understanding of an unfamiliar topic, and can connect you to useful sources such as professional organizations and federal documents.

TIP: Vanilla Google searches can be made more powerful by taking advantage of a few useful tricks. For example, you may want to only search a particular domain or website. Do so by adding “site:” before or after your search terms. For example: site:.edu or site:.gov.

You can also have Google provide you with only certain types of results. For example, if you only want to see PowerPoint presentations or PDFs in your search results, try: Filetype:pdf or filetype:pptx.