Chris Nolan's Presentation on Searching the Internet for Scholarly Sources

Chris Nolan, an assistant librarian at TU, made a presentation about how to search the Internet for sources that are academically appropriate. I learned a lot from the information he presented. For example, I learned that in a Google search the sites listed first are arranged from the most relevant, popular sites, including sites with the highest frequency of words searched to the least relevant. Word order matters as well. Popularity is not related to the number of times people look at a site, but rather corresponds to the number of times that a site is linked on a search by other websites. Some companies use this feature to their advantage for free advertising, which causes problems for Google.

I was surprised to learn how advanced the Google search engine is. I had never used any other feature besides the "Search" bar. However, you can use the Advanced Search to limit sources to ".edu", ".gov", or any other type of site that you are looking for. You could also type "site:.gov" or "site:.edu" in the search bar. Mr. Nolan explained that wikipedia.com can be a good place to start researching a site, but should never be used in a paper. He also mentioned that ".org" sites, which are linked to nonprofit organizations, are not reliable for academic information because they have a specific agenda to promote their ideas and, therefore, often are slanted towards their beliefs. Another way to find scholarly articles is by using the Google Scholar feature, which lists sites that Google has flagged as scholarly material like journals and books.