College v2

With much of the world’s information moving from print form into the online realm, knowing how to find the information you need, whilst sorting through the crap, is becoming an increasinly important skill. It’s a skill you’ll likely utilize as a college student, and again later when you begin your career. I’d love for you to join me as we delve into the world of online searching (particularly with the Google search engine since it is the most used) with a new series of informative articles – the Google Search Series.

Searching the web can be a daunting task, but it doesn’t have to be that way. By learning just a few simple techniques, you can be on your way to Googling with the best. It’s a skill that in today’s day and age you need to learn. As technology, the internet, and how we interact with those evolves, we are becoming increasingly relied upon to separate the good information from the bad information. Knowing how to find good information online in a timely manner will set you apart and make you a more valuable asset in your future career.

When it comes to online searching, there are a few topics and questions that come up frequently: How do you find something, and how do you find it fast? And how do you sort the questionable sites from the legitimate and reliable ones? Who do you trust?

Getting started with search, and narrowing down your results with operators and Advanced Search.

You can make your search as broad as you want, or narrow it down to specifics for a smaller pool of results. Searching for “dogs” will yield you a high number of search results – way more than you or anyone has the time to search through. So at this point you would want to narrow down your search, and there are several ways of doing this. But first, the basic Google search rules you NEED TO KNOW:

• Punctuation doesn’t count. So don’t worry about it. (Punctuation referring to . , ! and the like. Does not include – or ‘)
• Keywords aren’t case sensitive. Google considers uppercase and lowercase letters to be equal.
• You are limited to ten words. Everything after ten words is truncated and ignored.
• Avoid misspellings. You won’t get the same search results. However, Google will show you the correct spelling and offer you the opportunity to do a search with the correct spelling.
• Be specific. The more targeted your keywords, the better your results.
• Singular and plural forms are different keywords to Google. So if the singular form doesn’t provide what you are looking for, try the plural form.
• Google ignores most common, short words like the, and, or, after in,, how, I, it, is was, will be, and so on. Google will notify you at the top of your search results if they have ignored some of your search terms. (Google will only recognize AND and OR when all capitalized and used as an operator.)
• Google finds results anywhere in a document, not just in its text (eg- the HTML of a page).
• Word order matters to Google. The first word is the most important word, and so on.

Now that you know the basics, we’ll move on to some more advanced stuff in Part 2 of this Google Search Series, coming up next.