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 up near the top of the page.

When I last ran this search in early August of 2015, I got over 2 billion results. I don't know about you, but I don't have time to sort through 2 billion results. 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 263 million results. Entering the keywords elementary science insects reduces the number to 755 thousand results.

Entering elementary science insects lesson plans reduces the number of results to about 273 thousand. 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 7 thousand. Adding the phrase "k-6" further reduces the number to under 4 hundred results. 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 the Google starting screen or down at the bottom of a Google results page. 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 with... all these words" box, enter phrases in the "this exact word or phrase" box, enter multiple keywords in the "any of these words" box and exclude "outliers" (troublesome words that are regularly appearing in your search results) with the "none of these 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 last update on pages and include or exclude sites or domain names using the Domain filter.

Note: Google is continually tweaking their advanced search interface. What you see might be a bit different than what I described in August of 2015 but the concept remains the same.

Google has an excellent "How to search on Google" tutorial available which will offer specific suggestions on effectively using Google's powerful Advanced Search. You can find this by typing "how to search on Google" in a new Google search. You might want to print copies of this tutorial for future reference. 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