Google basics
Click on the image to see a larger version
Google is obviously one of the best known search engines, but are you making full use of all the features Google offers? Watch the video on 'Making the most of Google' and explore the other boxes on this page to find out more about how Google can be used.
Making the most of Google
(Source of video: you tube)
Google Search
Try exploring some of the search options available within Google to improve the relevancy of the results you get.
The video above shows you some of the search options you can try.
Use the Advanced Search in Google to help you to focus your search results.
This poster explains some of the ways you can refine your Google search to achieve better results.
Click on the image to see a larger version.
Test your Search Skills
Try this search challenge to test your skills, you will find a new task here every day.
You can find more searches to try by clicking on the dates at the bottom of the box.
TED talk
An interesting TED talk on the use of filters by search engines.
Google tools
Google has a number of really useful search features as shown in the diagram above:
(Slide from: Makselon, J., 2011. Google tips, The research process for EPQ. Tanglin Trust School, unpublished.)
- Google ImagesGoogle Images is Google's tool for searching its index of images from all over the Web. Google's robots analyze dozens of factors on and about webpages (like captions, descriptions, and other contextual information) to understand and index the images on the Web.
- Google NewsGoogle News is a computer-generated news site that aggregates headlines from more than 4,500 English-language news sources worldwide, groups similar stories together and displays them according to each reader's personalised interests.
- Google BlogsGoogle Blogs is Google search technology focused on blogs.
- Google ScholarGoogle Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Google Scholar helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research.
- Google BooksGoogle Books. Search and preview millions of books from libraries and publishers worldwide using Google Book Search. Discover a new favourite or unearth an old classic.
Deeper Web Search
Another alternative search engine to try is DeeperWeb which may help you to find some of those sites which get hidden in the middle of a long results list when using a traditional Google search.
This is a description of DeeperWeb from the DeeperWeb site:
