Web Searching
Here's how to craft a better search to get fewer and more relevant results in Google:
- Identify the main ideas in your research question.
Give examples of cultivars of your species (e.g., quinoa). - Limit your search to a specific domain, such as .edu, .gov, or .org
quinoa cultivars site:.org
quinoa site:.gov
quinoa site:.edu
More information on advanced Google searching and Google Scholar.
How to Evaluate Websites
Initial Observations:
To get a quick, initial overview of a website, look at information on the website's "About Us" page.
In-Depth Evaluation Strategy:
To dig deeper into the credibility and reliability of a website, you'll need to do more reading and investigating, including:
- fact-checking
- learning what other sources say about the website (lateral reading)
The video below, from the University of Louisville, discusses "lateral reading", which is a strategy professional fact-checkers use to determine how reliable an online source is.
Citizen Literacy was created by Robert Detmering, Amber Willenborg, and Terri Holtze for University of Louisville Libraries and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.