Search Engines: Google updated 5.8.11

Without a doubt, Google is the premier search engine available on the web today. Google offers 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 history 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 ran this search in mid 2011, I got over 1.6 billion hits. I don't know about you, but I don't have time to sort through 1.6 billion 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 american history reduces the number to a little more than 20 million hits. Entering the keywords early american history reduces the number to under 10 million hits. Entering early american history colonies reduces the number of hits to 8 million. 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 "early american history" reduces the number of hits to just over 400,000. Adding a second phrase "colonial williamsburg" further reduces the number to just over 23,000 hits. Now we're getting closer to 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 a similar 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 "with all of the words" box, enter phrases in the "with the exact phrase" box, enter multiple keywords in the "with at least one of the words" box and exclude "outliers" (troublesome words that are regularly appearing in your search results). 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, specify the update 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!

Record your comments on this search site in your logbook.

Add relevant History/Social Science 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