Secrets of Super Searchers
The best searchers know how to find the most useful information in the shortest period of time. Here are some of the ways they do it.
Step 1 Create a Short List of Topic-Related Search Terms
Example:hydraulic fracturing, fracking, fracking waste water, fracking and pollution, natural gas drilling and pollution, fracking and contamination, fracking and sustainability
Step 2 Use Advanced Google Search
1.Click on the Google Search Engine. In the lower right hand corner, click on the word Settings and choose Advanced search. Advanced search gives you the options to search by:File type (pdf, PPt, or doc); Site (Wikipedia.org, UNESCO) and Domain (.edu, .org, .net, or .gov)
Advanced Search Strategy Example:
Search terms= climate change West Africa cocoa
Domain = .org
File type = pdf
Search results: Your search should have yielded a pdf report fromThe International Center for Tropical Agriculture (.org) titled “Predicting the Impact of Climate Change on the Cocoa-Growing Regions in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire.”
Step 3 Use Advanced Google Images Search
Click on the Google Search Engine and click on Images. Type in the keywords of your desired image. Example: Lake Mead water level. When your search results appear, click on this wheel icon and choose Advanced Images searchwhich gives you the options of searching by:Image size; aspect ratio (shape of image); color in image; type of image (face, photo, clip art, line drawing, animated); region (specific country); site or domain (Wikipedia. Org or .edu, .org, .com, or .net, etc.)and*usage rights (not filtered by license, free to use, share, modify, etc.)
Advanced Google Images Search Strategy
Search terms = Lake Mead water level
Image size = Medium
Colors in Image = full color
Aspect Ratio = wide
Type of Image = photo
File format = any format
Usage Rights = free to use or share
Search results: you should have accessed several photos of Lake Mead that show the dramatically low water level of recent years.
Step 4 Use Google Scholar for Reports, Data, Graphs, etc.
Click on the Google Search engine and type in the words Google Scholar. Enter desired search terms into the search box. If you retrieve an article of interest, read it and note additional keywords. Return to Google Scholar and enter these different terms and read or capture your results.
Google Scholar Sample Searches: cattle methane pollution
cattle methane production
methane gas greenhouse effect
Step 5 Search the Invisible Web
The Invisible Web also known as “the Deep Web” is information that you cannot locate using traditional types of search tools such as Google, Google Scholar, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, etc. If you enter desired search terms into a search engine such as Google followed by the word “database”, “statistics”, “reports”, or “graphs”, you may get into the Invisible Web and find extremely useful information about your topic.
Example: San Francisco earthquake vulnerability report
San Francisco earthquake damage statistics
seismic safe building cost report
earthquake damage soil type graph
iPL2 (Internet Public Library 2) Enter desired search terms in main search box or click on the link Resources by Subject, click on Science & Technology. Scroll to a relevant database such as Science Daily and type in search terms i.e. seismic safe building design.
Prepared by K. Craver & K. Dickinson 5/2015