Google Search Tips
Here's how to craft a better search to get fewer and more relevant results in Google:
- Put phrases in quotation marks: "united states" "sri lanka"
- Limit your search to a specific domain, such as .edu, .gov, or .org
women education "sri lanka" site:.org
women education "sri lanka" site:.gov
women education "sri lanka" site:.edu - Limit your results to recent information. Use Tools > Any time to adjust the date.
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.
What Do Others Say about the Source?
Open new browser tabs and search for information from reputable sources to learn more about a source's background, purpose, funding, reputation, and biases.
Search for the name of the organization and/or person who originally published the information.
Search Tip: Put quotation marks around the name of the organization you're searching for to ensure it's searched as a phrase (e.g., "migration policy institute").
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.