Search Engines: Google

Without a doubt, Google is the premier search engine available on the web today. Google offers one of the largest database of indexed webpages and is the first stop for many web searchers.

The sheer size of Google can sometimes get in the way of effective online research. Let me show you what I mean...

Click here to open the Google search engine in a new browser window.

Enter the word science in the Google search box and click the Google Search button (or press the enter/return key). Notice the number of hits in the blue bar.

When I last ran this search in early April of 2010, I got over 650 million hits. I don't know about you, but I don't have time to sort through 650 million hits. Obviously, the size of the Google database is working against us by providing far too many hits.

Let's try several strategies to limit the number of hits to a more manageable number. The first of these strategies is entering multiple keywords in the search box. Let's see how it works...

Entering the keywords elementary science reduces the number to than 55.7 million hits. Entering the keywords elementary science insects reduces the number to 25 million hits.

Entering elementary science insects lesson plans reduces the number of hits to about 275,000. This is still a huge number of hits but we can readily see that entering multiple keywords effectively reduces the number of hits returned by Google.

Another very effective strategy is to use quotation marks to identify phrases. Let's see how that works...

Entering "insect lesson plans" reduces the number of hits to under 5,000. Adding the phrase "k-6" further reduces the number to under 200 hits. Now we're getting some manageable numbers.

You may have noticed several commercial sites near the top of the list which you do not want included in the list of hits. For example, links to the Amazon.com online bookstore often appear on the list. You can exclude these by entering -.com (the minus sign followed by .com) at the end of your search string. This quickly removes all the .com (commercial) sites from the list.

You can use this domain filtering strategy to focus your search on specific domains. Adding +.edu returns only college and university sites. Adding +.org returns only non-profit organization sites.

The real power of Google begins to shine through when you switch from the default search screen to the Advanced Search screen. Look for the Advanced Search link that is available on every Google screen. Clicking on this link opens the Advanced Search interface which allows the user to use multiple advanced search options at one time.

You can multiple key words in the "Find web pages that have... all of the words" box, enter phrases in the "this exact wording or phrase" box, enter multiple keywords in the "one or more of these words" box and exclude "outliers" (troublesome words that are regularly appearing in your search results) with the "Don't show pages that have... any of these unwanted words" option.

You can limit your search results to webpages written in English using the Language drop down box, search for specific file types such as PowerPoint or Word Documents with the File type options, specify the Date on pages and include or exclude sites or domain names using the Domain filter.

There is an excellent "Advanced Search Tips" tutorial available which will offer additional suggestions on effectively using Google's powerful Advanced Search (click on the Advanced Search Tips link). I know... we are educators and rarely use the Help files but this one is worth a look!

Try some of those advanced search strategies on Google using your own topic.

Add relevant resources that you found using this search site to your bookmarks/favorites collection.

As good as Google is, it is not the only useful search engine. Several others are equally powerful and offer features not yet found on Google.

Next: Searching with Ask