Step 3: How should you search?
If you’ve gone through the previous steps properly, you should now know what you’re looking for and where you’re going to search for it. There remains only the question of figuring out how to find the information as quickly as possible. This may seem like an obvious step. You type a few search terms into the search engine of your database or the Internet, and the results appear within a few seconds on your screen. Done! Right?
Sure, that’s one way to do it—if you’ve got the time to go over all one thousand hits to find relevant ones. However, you can save yourself a whole lot of time by making the search engines work for you (or, in this case, for your search question). There are a few ways to do this:
- Experiment with your search terms.
- Use Boolean operators.
- Use thesauri for synonyms or related search terms.
- Use truncation for different endings of your search terms.
Example of ‘Google Digging’
|
