The internet has an enormous wealth of information world-wide, therefore, it can be an effective source for finding the right answer to a question. About Google, Yahoo! and Bing you've probably heard, DuckDuckGo is a search engine that is gaining popularity because of the privacy it offers to users.
The Internet has a great deal of information, but the trick is to find precisely what you are looking for amid that information explosion. There are a number of tips to help you use search engines as efficiently as possible.
The following ten tips for typing Google searches will enable you to search Google more efficiently. The most important operators and symbols when using a search engine, particularly with Google, include:
You can also perform advanced searches with search engines, but this way provides fewer options in compared with the advanced search in a database.
A more privacy-friendly alternative to the default search engines is DuckDuckGo, although it does have some limitations. DuckDuckGo performs adequately but especially when it comes to search results in Dutch, it falls short of e.g. Google and does not always find the most relevant search results. However, most of the time it does just fine and therefore Google does not prove to be absolutely necessary.
Those who still want to quickly go to Google can quickly switch from DuckDuckGo to Google by typing !g after the command in DuckDuckGo's search bar. That will then take the search query with it, making it relatively effortless to perform a particular search with Google anyway.
Google Scholar falls somewhere between a database and a search engine and, therefore, is also referred to as a scientific search engine. In terms of appearance, it resembles the typical Google search engine. A major difference, however, is that the results are limited to searching through scientific literature. By the way, the hits from Google Scholar also appear in the standard Google search, only you will need to search through numerous other hits to find them.
Google Scholar offers a simple method to search scientific literature. The search results are ranked by relevance: the full text of each article is searched while taking into account who the author is, the publication in which the article appears and how often the article has been cited in scientific literature.