Jane Dewhurst
Using Search Engines Effectively Writing I
Imagine you’re preparing a presentation for a linguistics seminar on English dialects. The first place you look will probably be the Web. True, there are amazing resources in the Internet, and undoubtedly you will find something about your topic. But then you might spend a half hour (or longer!) clicking on links that the search engine listed for you only to realize that what you were really looking for is not there anywhere. You keep going on to the next page, in the ever more desperate hope that you will find THE page that has the information you need. Sound familiar?
Say you do then finally come across a site that is full of information you can use. First of all, you should remember that you cannot just copy and paste the site into your own notes and then present the information without giving the source. When quoting from a website, the MLA convention is that you give the title (underlined) and editor of the project, followed by any sponsoring institution or organisation, the date and then, finally, the URL in >. A reference to a website on the status of women in Victorian England, therefore, would look like this:-
1 Victorian Women Writers Project. Ed. Perry Willett. June 1998. Indiana University <But even assuming you use quotation marks correctly, and paraphrase and summarize without copying and you even know what a bibliographic entry for a website looks like, there is still an unanswered question. How do you know this page you have found is worth quoting from in the first place?
Today’s exercise will show you some tricks to help you search more effectively, and next week we will consider some ways to determine if the page you have found is a trustworthy source of information. Google is certainly not the only search engine available, but for the sake of simplicity it is the only one we will be using. Many of the search tips you’ll learn are also applicable to other search engines.
So, Step 1 is fairly obvious: go to
Already having problems? Your computer might tell the server that it prefers to speak German, in which case you will get even if you type in .com. To get to the American site, click on the link “Go to google.com” on the German homepage. (You can also enter )
Step 2: Look at Google’s own page of search tips: Browse through the “Basics of Search” and “Advanced Search” pages, where you will find out how to do all of the searches you need to complete this exercise. Keep the site open while doing the searches so you can come back to it easily.
Step 3: Say you are doing a presentation on the English-based languages spoken in the Caribbean. Obviously you can type Caribbean in the search box and get some sites, and undoubtedly somewhere there would be information about museums and galleries. However, with just the search term Caribbean, you will get about 16,400,000 hits. By the time you read through all of them, the professor teaching this class will be long-since retired. In fact, by then you will probably be retired. So, you have to narrow your search. What search terms could you use to narrow your search?
Search terms used:
Two most promising websites you find with these search terms (copy and paste the addresses):
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Step 4: You realize as you pick out the letters one by one on the keyboard that at some point you really will need to learn to type. Just now, for instance, you searched for CaRIBbean, and then you typed in Carribean. What are the results for each of these searches?
Step 5: You are suddenly struck by the thought that it would be nice to actually go on a cruise around the Caribbean instead of preparing a presentation about how people from the Caribbean talk to each other. Try searching for Caribbean cruise and then "my Caribbean cruise". What is the difference?
Step 6: Ah, so many islands, so many choices. But your wallet is starting to hurt, looking at the price lists for these luxury cruise liners. You decide instead to fly to one Caribbean island and stay as cheaply as possible in a hotel or hostel. You have narrowed it down to Jamaica or Bermuda. How do you do a search that gives you information on a vacation on EITHER of these two islands?
Search terms used:
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Step 7: Unfortunately, you are beginning to realize that the whole vacation idea is way beyond your financial resources. You decide to get through the semester first, and think about vacations later when your bank account is looking healthier. You have to find out information about a nineteenth-century English writer of historical novels and poetry called Peacock (you don't know his first name). Any search for Peacock returns lots of pages on birds and also some on a Canadian author called Shane Peacock, who is obviously not your man. Nor is Carol Peacock, who has written a book on adoption. How can you do a search that will only return sites that have the name Peacock,do NOT have the word birds, the word Shane or the word Carol, AND DO somewhere have the word author?
Search terms used:
Step 8: Well, you have all the information you need about Peacock's life and work. Now you would like to see a picture of him. You could click on all the sites you have found until you find one or you could use Google to search for an image of him. How do you do that?
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Step 9: You have become so interested in Peacock and his adaptation of medieval legends that you have decided to go to Britain to study English literature for a term. You seem to remember hearing that De Montfort university has a good reputation, but you have no idea where it is...
Homepage of De Montfort University:
Two towns in which it is located:
Step 10: You have now found the De Montfort homepage and you want to see if there is any information on courses in English literature. Obviously, you could just browse through the site. However, there is also a way to do a search on Google that searches not the entire web, but a specific site. To search for the phrase English literature only on the website of De Montfort university, what would your search terms be? (If you’ve gotten by so far without reading the Advanced Search Tips, you might want to do so now:
Search terms used:
Step 11: You’re telling your family about your plans to spend a semester at the University of de Montfort in Leicester. Your brother has a French friend visiting whose German is not that great and he would like to know more about Leicester. Using google.com, you do a search for sites about Leicester that are in French. How do you do this?