## 3.8 : Search engines

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.

#### 3.8.1 : Tips

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:

- AND OR ( ) Use capital letters and be careful of the placement of ().
- filetype:pdf Using lower-case letters without spaces restricts results to PDF documents.
- “...........” When looking up compound search terms like 'social history', and sentence segments like 'cycling in Limburg'.
- 2010..2014 Without spaces. This provides the approximate publication year.
- -........... Without spaces. This excludes a word (= the Boolean NOT operator)
- ~.......... Without spaces. Also look for possible synonyms (e.g. ~navo also provides 'nato').
- allintitle:........ Without spaces. Searches the title of a website, not the website itself.
- inurl:........ Without spaces. Search the folder structure, rather than the text (e.g. 'inurl:ikea')

You can also perform advanced searches with search engines, but this way provides fewer options in compared with the advanced search in a database.

Note: Nearly anyone can publish information on the internet without undergoing a thorough editing process. You will have to evaluate the reliability of internet sources yourself. See module 4 for an overview of the evaluation criteria.

#### ​​3.8.2 : Google Scholar

​​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.

If you’re in school and visit Google Scholar, you’re being recognized automatically as a student, which enables you to access many full-text articles by clicking the link "Greeni Full Text". When you are at home or elsewhere off-campus, first of all, make sure you are logged in to your university's network (see remote access) and then go to Google Scholar via the Greeni database list. When you go searching for literature in Google Scholar, you will now see a link to the right of some of the search results (see picture below). Click the title to go to the full-text article directly.