Hi! My name is Emily. I’m the Learning Resources Assistant at Sherman College. Marggi kindly asked me to do a guest entry on her BLOG, so we thought a good topic would be research.
Research?! I know, I know, you thought you had left that ugly topic behind long ago! There’s always something to learn, though, and knowing where to look makes it easy and fun to find more information than you ever thought existed! The following was adapted from an entry in my own BLOG a few months ago. Enjoy!
Here’s something new I just learned. There apparently exists a whole multitude of underground search groups (undoubtedly geeks like me!) called Extreme Googlers. These people sit around all day and think up new and wonderful ways to utilize Internet search engine, Google.com. Here are a few things I learned:
You probably already know about Google Scholar. (http://scholar.google.com/ ) This is a place to search only for scholarly or academic articles. You may not always find the full text, but it’s definitely a great place to get started.
Or how about Google’s Book search? (http://books.google.com/ ) Where you can search the full text of books for your topic of choice?
There’s also Specialized Searches (http://www.google.com/options/specialsearches.html) to search for things such as public services or universities.
And of course Froogle (http://froogle.google.com/ ) to shop online!
All of these you can find by going under the “More” tab on the Google homepage.
Extreme Google goes one step further. You can limit your searches by typing in certain phrases before or after your search. For instance: “filetype:ppt” before your search terms will bring up only PowerPoint presentations. You can limit the domain you are searching for by typing “site: domaintype” (i.e. site:edu or site:gov)
Did you know you can actually have Google do your math for you? (Don’t tell your kids this though!) Simply type in the math problem. For example, type in the equation: (4*7)/8 and like magic, Google does the math for you. There are more Google tricks but I’ll leave it up to you to discover them. Here’s a hint though: http://www.infopeople.org/training/past/2005/extr_googling/ this is the website for Extreme Googling. Take a look. If nothing else, you’ll learn something new!
Here are a couple of links for more Google commands:
http://www.infopeople.org/training/past/2005/extr_googling/chtsht3-LimitCommands.pdf
http://bookmarks.infopeople.org/extreme_googling_bk.htm
Happy Googling!
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