Research Skills for Writers - Search Engines

As a chartered librarian, Research is one of my areas of expertise. Questions which have arisen in my recent writing class reminded me how important research skills are for writers.

Whether you are writing a fantasy novel or an article, it's important that your facts are accurate, or your work is not likely to get past the editor, and even less likely to get past the readers!

There is an incredible amount of information freely available on the internet. However, there is also an awful lot of rubbish. Subsequent posts will look at weeding out the rubbish. In this one, I want to look at how you can use search engines more effectively, to find fewer, more accurate results.

Google is fairly ubiquitous. I have a love / hate relationship with Google - it is the best search engine out there, but does not respect privacy, or copyright!

Alternatives to Google:

https://duckduckgo.com/ This search engine does not track your searches, nor does it plague you with endless adverts.

https://www.dogpile.com/ A great meta-search engine, which offers many of the same filters as Google, and I find this a really good alternative. It has a unique search algorithm, so returns slightly different results to Google.

https://www.bing.com/ This is the Microsoft search engine. In my experience, it returns more irrelevant results, although they have made significant changes to the look and feel of it.

If you are a Google fan, you can use it more effectively by using

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.co.uk/ which omits a lot of advertising, and limits the results to more scholarly sites.

Google books: Google have digitized large numbers of books. In some instances, you will have a few chapters of a book, and in others much larger sections or the whole text, all available free online. You can search by subject, or for a specific book: https://books.google.co.uk/

Search Terms

Whichever site you use, if your search terms (search string) are not good, then it will show in your results.

Many search engines (and library subscription based resources) use Boolean logic. This is simply a way of refining your search by including or excluding terms, and identifying phrases to find.

It is not as complicated as it sounds:

use inverted commas " " for any phrase you want to search. This is best done for people's names. For example, a search for John Smith will return people named John and people named Smith. But, if you search for "John Smith" you will only find people named John Smith.

if you want to search for the animal bat, and not a cricket bat, then you can use NOT to eliminate the wrong kind of bats by typing bat NOT cricket. Sometimes a minus (-) sign is used to achieve the same result.

AND allows you to combine two search terms and say you want both eg: Eggs AND Ham will give you sites that talk about both, and should not return results that include only one of these terms.

OR allows you to indicate a synonym. If you want to do research on Mobile phones, which are known as Cell phones in the US, then search for Mobile OR Cell phones to search for sites that use either term.

Wildcards vary depending on the site, and can be either * or in some instances # or & these allow you to search for multiple terms, such as searching for both woman and women using wom*n.

An alternative to Boolean is to use Google Advanced. A link used to appear for this on the Google home page, which has subsequently been removed. You can now find it with this link. It allows you to conduct to search effectively.

https://www.google.com/advanced_search

Google is constantly refining its search functions, and are increasingly removing the ability to search using Boolean logic. Instead, results are returned based on what you previously searched. If a researcher is not cautious, this can lead to a bias, as you will be directed to one point of view.

Many search engines now also include options for the type of file you want, so if you want an image, it pays to do an image search, or search for videos, news etc, depending on what you need. Use the tabs to filter your results, and save you time.

It's also worth thinking of alternative phrases to use in your search strings - sometimes changing the wording of your search will improve what you find. If your search doesn't work with one set of phrases, try another.

You can test your Google search skills with this game: https://www.agoogleaday.com/ where you pit your skills at finding information online against the clock.

If you are looking for a particular document, try searching for the whole title as a phrase " ". And if you can't find it for free, try asking at this Twitter hashtag: #icanhazpdf

Libraries pay for good quality information, and a professional librarian loves helping people find information - it's what they do, so it's worth asking your local library and librarian for help. Librarians are the original search engine, way before Google!

If you learn to search effectively, you should reduce the number of irrelevant results that come up, and also cut down on your research time.