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Google and Google Scholar Search Tips: Home

This LibGuide is designed to teach you how to search Google and Google Scholar more efficiently and effectively.

Teachers and librarians often warn students about the potential risks of using Google for academic research. After all, web sites are often unstable, unscholarly, and, generally, a poor substitute for library collections or paid subscription databases like Encyclopedia Britannica, EBSCO Host, Gale, JSTOR, or ProQuest.

Nevertheless, Wikipedia's popularity still reigns and there are a growing number of legitimate research guides, full-text collections, and other scholarly tools on the free web worth exploring. The challenge, with hundreds of millions of indexed sites, is finding the right ones. Fortunately, there are a number of search techniques that researchers can use to refine their Google search results. 
 

Other search engines to try: Top 15 Best Search Engines

Understanding PageRank

Google uses an algorithm for ranking its web pages known as PageRank and analyzes page content using Hypertext-Matching Analysis. The higher the PageRank the more important the page is deemed to be. According to Google, this algorithm includes over 500 million variables and 2 billion terms, and is changed frequently. Google considers the following aspects as most important:

  • How popular a page is-- how many pages link to it and how highly those are ranked
  • The size and position of the search terms within the page
  • The proximity of the search terms within the page
  • The searcher's preferences based on prior searches and stored data

Source; https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PageRank-hi-res.png

How Google Search Works

Want to learn more?

Watch this 5 minute video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eKVizvYSUQ

Explore Google's Search Education Page:

https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/

See Google's Search Guide:

http://www.googleguide.com/web_address.html

How Google Works

When the Googlebot spider scans web servers on the the Internet, it creates an index and reports back relevant findings. While retrieved search results will not surpass 1000 items, currently 2,670,000,000 items are consulted in one form or another. The graphic below displays the step-by-step process taken when conducting a search.

Matt Cutt Explains