Question

RUNNING PROBLEM After his second physiology class, Jimmy introduced himself to his professor and explained his problem. The professor's first suggestion was simple: try to narrow the search. "One of the best ways to search is to combine terms using the connector AND If you remember set theory from your math class, the connec- tor AND will give you the intersection of the sets. In other words, you'll get only the results that occur in both sets." Seemed simple enough. Jimmy went back to the Internet and tried diabetes and insulin. That search still had 46 million results but on the first page was a link to the American Diabetes Asso- ciation, diabetes.org.Now he was getting somewhere. Q2: What kinds of websites should Jimmy be looking for in his results list, and how can he recognize them? 16 19 24 2 5 12

Answer 1

In a search engine like Google, entering keywords is very important to get the desired results. The results page in Google will show the results which has our keyed in words and similar results. The results are in descending order. The results which are close to the requested keyword are shown on the first page and then the list goes on. So, the count of millions of results for a keyword should not frighten oneself.

As rightly suggested by Professor, multiple keywords can be keyed in at the same time. Maximum of 32 words can be added. There are also many search hacks which can make our work easy such as adding quotes to search for the exact word, using keyword PDF before the search word, to get the PDF downloadable version, etc.

Once we finalise on the keywords, which we think is most closely related to the required result (we can alter the keywords anytime, if it does not produce the correct result) and click the search bar we get the results page.

Depending on the purpose of our search, we can choose from the results. If the intent is to gain information on a topic, one can go through Wikipedia, blogs, association websites etc. If the intent is to gather notes for a project, then journals, articles, google books or PDF has to be relied on. One can also make use Scholarly Google and Google Books tab. This is because it has accurate and authentic information. So, depending on the purpose, one has to click on the relevant search result. Next, for identifying the result, google mentions the website address, along with a preview of the information in the site. This will help us to glance the site and decide even before entering it. Next, the website has addresses which gives us hints about what the site, such as journals (articles and journals), .org (for association website), wikipedia, etc.