How to do Research Online

of a sparrow. Okay, and guess what, guys, it's your job to look that up and tell me where it's from. Special listener challenge. Yeah, it's it's easy enough. Um. So we're going to talk about conducting research online. I'll to use online tools to research. Because a lot of you out there are in middle school and high school. We get emails from you all the time, and first of all, shout out to all of you guys. You guys are awesome and keep up the great work, especially listening to

wonderful podcasts like ours. But beyond that, we've also received email from others who have asked us about research techniques. UM see uh Is and Marie Right and Marie I see I didn't write your name down, Emory. I apologize. And Marie has written to us on a couple of occasions asking if we might address research techniques and citations

things like that. Well, really, the whole citations element is kind of outside the scope of tech stuff, but we can certainly address how to conduct research online and how to get the best information for whatever it is that you're searching for. UM, because a lot of us are just simply using Google in the most basic way and not getting the best information. Google is doing a lot behind the scenes to try and give us the best information based upon what we tell Google we want to see,

but sometimes it has to make guesses. Sometimes the keywords we throw in there are just a mishmash, and Google's like, well, I'll give you this. I think it's what you want. But there are ways where you can you can refine your search, whether you're using Google or some other search methods, some other search engine. I use Google because it's almost become like xerox or Kleenex the universal term, but I do realize that people use other search engines. Um, there

are techniques you can use to get the best information possible. Yes, UM, actually I would recommend this really groovy article on how stuff works dot com about the Google algorithm and what makes it so special. I was written by as a hack, some guy Strickland. Anyway, Yeah, if you if you're really interested in knowing how Google specifically works, because Google sort

of revolutionized the search industry online. I mean for many years when Yahoo was doing everybody loved Yahoo, but they were doing it by end, which is actually a very effective way to do it, except in that it requires a lot of people and a lot of time to do that, which and of course, as more people joined the Internet, more content was created on the Internet, meaning more content had to be sorted through, so it becomes a losing game eventually, because unless you have hired everyone

on the planet to also help categorize and rank information, you just can't keep up with the amount of info that's out there. So Google's algorithm helped automate that, so you didn't have to worry about doing it by hand. Yes, but I know you did want to to speak on a specific tactic if you want to use Google more effectively. Yeah, we're going to talk a little bit about bullying logic. Okay, that's named after George bole Yes and bullying logic is a fairly complex UH concept, but it's a it's a

mathematical concept, right. It's a way, it's the way of using operators to UH to make an argument or search for information. As it turns out, because a lot of arch engines are very good at at incorporating Boolean logic, so not all of them, not all of them, and some of them have a specific advanced search function that

makes this even easier. But we're going to go through the basic operators and what they do and what they mean within most search engines, and then we'll talk a little bit maybe about advanced search options, and then we'll go into more detail about other other things online that you can use for for research. So the basic operators and Boolean logic, as far as it pertains to search, are and or and not. Okay, So I'll start with OR. Now OR helps you increase your your range of searches.

You know your search results. You're gonna get a wider range of search results using or as an operator. And this lets you search for two terms. Usually you're using two terms that are kind of interchangeable or mean more or less the same thing. Um and you use that

to try and get a wider net of results. So you might say, uh, dogs or canines in your search, and then you're going to get search results that have the keyword dogs or canines featured in them in some way, because some results may use one term and the others may use another, and you want to be able to see everything that's out there, So you're gonna get more results that way than if you search for just dogs or just canines. Um. Now, if you use and, you

might think, oh, well, doesn't that do the same thing. Actually, no, and narrows your search because with and, it's going to look for search results that have both terms. And when I say both, you should keep in mind this is not limited to just to search terms. Technically, you can throw in as many search terms as you want and uh, it just is going to continually narrow your field of arch. So in this case, you may want to look for let's let's say you're searching for horror and science fiction.

You're only going to get results that have both of those terms in them. Right now, if you use horror or science fiction, you would get all of them had either or both of those terms. So and narrows your search. This can be really helpful if you're looking for specific

news about a particular topic. So if you did Gulf of Mexico and oil spill and solutions, that would help you narrow your search to potential solutions to fix the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, right theoretically anyway, Um, and then there is think you think the company would have lifted those up? Yeah? Oh, there it is. It's on Google. Oh we're gonna get male. I'm kidding, BP, Please don't send your goons after us. I notice I didn't say who it was son of up. So anyway,

let's get to the third one. Not now not helps you get search results for one term and excludes results that contain a specific related term. So let's say that you want to do a research on on mice but not you don't want anything to do about rats, So you could do a search for mice not rats, and you would only get search results that talked about mice. If rats were mentioned in the search, in the in the in the page, it would be excluded from the

search results. So again, it's another way to narrow your search so that you don't get information that is not relevant to what you need. Now, advanced search options usually make this easier because I mean, you can type these things in actually, and you usually don't need to type

in at all. That's understood. If you just do a string of keywords in your search, it's the search engine generally a suit whoms that you mean and Yes, But when you're using the bullion operators um, if you really specifically want to use them, you do need to put them in all caps yes, because because that's that's the thing that tells it, Oh, you specifically want these things.

And if you're looking for a specific search string which includes things uh, words that would normally be discarded called stop wards, things like and and the um, because it's looking for the big words in the title, the things that are are unique and those words, those stop wards are so common that Google it's meaningless to do a search for them. Yes, you can do a search for

the UM, but Google just says everything. But if you will allow me to to bore everyone but probably the educators and library geeks among you, since I just got my degree and I want to use it for something. UM. We're talking about two things here called precision and recall Um, these things are inversely proportional. So the more precise your search results are, the let the fewer of them you're going to get, and vice versa, or increases your recall.

So you're going to get lots and lots and lots of stuff, but you're not going to have very precise results. If you want precision, you need to narrow it down, um, using and and and you know to some degree not or yeah, um wait not yes, okay, UM, So just keep in mind what you're trying to do. And you know, I think a lot of people when they are looking for information kind of like poking around, you know, the serendipity search, What am I gonna find? Want to do this?

But if you're in a hurry, boolean operators can really be your friend. Yeah. And as as I was saying earlier about advanced search options, these usually if you if you choose the advanced search option on a on a search engine, and I'm going to stick with Google because that's just well, it's a popular one. It's easy to talk about. Um. It usually opens up a a a

new screen with additional options for search. So it'll have one field where you can type in all the keywords that you want that you that should appear in the search result, and may have a separate field for any keywords that you do not want to be in your search result. So that would be the not feature. The first one was the end. The other one, or actually I guess the first one that's the first one is

the end because all of them do appear. They also have once where you can say this or that you know anything that has this or that should come back to me. Um. So it incorporates the boolean logic in actual little fields that you fill out, so you don't have to remember the operators or or type them in or anything, because you just type this, You type the right keywords in the right fields, and it does it

for you. But it also gives you other options. Uh. For example, you can search for exact phrasing, which you can actually do in a regular search engine. You just have to know to put it into quotation marks. Yes, like anything within quotation marks, the search engine interprets that

as look for this specific sequence of words. So nuclear radiation, for example, if you put that within quotation marks, it would look for search results that use the phrase nuclear radiation, which theoretically would get you closer to the results you need, because you know you don't want articles just on radiation in general, because not all radiation is nuclear, So you know, this would help you narrow that search. Again, it's another

way of narrowing. But it can also do things like Google's will allow you to search for specific file types. So if you're looking for like you know that you saw an article online once and it was in PDF format but you can't quite remember, you know, you can narrow your search that way and say just PDFs and Google will look for just pds online. Um, that's just one example. Obviously, Uh, it allows you to search within

a domain. You can also do this in the general search bar if you know the right trick, which is really just typing site s I T E. Colon, then the address of the or the domain of the site that you're searching, and then whatever your search terms are that will do perform a Google search within a specific domain.

So let's say that you happen to know that the information that you're looking for was in an article that appeared on the register, you could you could use the that to specify the search so that way it doesn't look anywhere else for this information, you're not going to get any irrelevant results from other sites. Uh. It can definitely be a time saver. It's really helped me out many many times. You can even do that on on parts of the site if you happen to know if

it's if it's divided. For example, if you were looking on how stuff works dot com for um, just to stick with name recognition, if we have a number of articles on Google um, and most of those are in the computer channel, so as computer dot how stuff works dot com instead of www dot how stuff works dot com.

But let's say you were interested in finding a video, you could do site colon videos dot how stuff works dot com and see and then put a space in there in type Google and if you it should returns just that the results from that video channel. And of course it's going to depend on the information architecture of

the site and whether or not that's possible. But for example, you know, that's why I picked how stuff Works dot com because I know it works with our site and it's easier to find articles if you happen to now um. But it also sort of depends on how well you know this site that you're searching. Yeah, and and the advanced search also allows you to do other things like you can search within a range of dates, so you can look for information that was that you know was

uploaded at a specific time. Um. If you know something like maybe it's an article that appeared last spring, then you can put in a range of dates. Again, you're excluding anything that falls outside that range. You don't have to worry about sorting through other stuff. Um. You can even search for results based on the usage rights. Now, granted, this is going to depend mainly upon the metadata that is in the the web page. This is something that the administrator of that web page has to include so

that Google can can identify it. Because Google is not quite smart enough yet to know the usage rights of every single web page it's out there. Um, because in some cases it may not even be explicitly stated. Uh. Then you know, you can even uh specify where on the web page the keywords should appear, which allows you to search. Let's say that you want to search for articles that are about a specific topic, but you don't want to get back articles that just kind of have

a little aside about that topic. You can actually have it so that it's only the pages that have the keywords within the page title, which theoretically should get you results that are more relevant to your search. So really, advanced search is a huge boon. I mean that's that alone. For we even get into anything more specific. Will really help help you narrow down your searches so that you

can get at relevant information quickly. Now, again, Google does a pretty good job at at having the relevant search most relevant things to your keywords at any rate appear at the top of the list, so you normally don't have to dig down too far. Um. It's not always the case, but they do a pretty good job of it. Yes, excuse me, well, Chris got all choked up. Yes I did.

It's just you know, they talk about the search topics. Um. Actually that's a good point, Jonathan, because um, I was just going to mention that, Uh, you might look at if you've ever played around, especially right after Being came out Microsoft launch Being, people were playing around with it to see how the results compared to Google. And you can put in the same topic on a Being search and a a Google search, and they're going to turn up probably some of the same results on the first page,

but not necessarily all of them. They might be ranked differently. UM. If you are a fan of one or the other, you might go, well, mind, my favorite is the best. Well maybe not necessarily. It sort of depends on the topic.

And one way to to sort of get everybody together um is to use a meta search engine, something like dogpile or um or surf wax for example surf wax dot com, and both of these use search multiple search engines at the same time, so it will look for the topic you request on Google and bing and Yahoo and ask dot com and possibly even Excite and Lycos and some of the others that have been around for a long time that use different methods to rank pages. And a lot of people really really like the meta

search engines. I know that that some of the people here at how stuff works dot com are are really fond of of a couple of them because they're not h they give you sort of a more in depth look at how the different sites rank the articles. And it's possible that use in different search engine might give you better results for any particular topic. Right, so you might use Google for one search and being for a different search, or asked dot com for a different search,

just depending on the results. Because one you may be looking for something particular that you know, one search engine turns up and the other does not, especially when you consider that the algorithms these different search engines use can UH that can determine what results you get on one

day to the next. You can do the exact same Google search or search on Being or any other real search engine that relies upon an algorithm, you can do with that search on various dates and get completely different results based upon how those pages rank UH due to the algorithm. So now some are going to change less frequently than others. Some you may do the search and then it will look the exact same way six months from now, but others, like you know, Google definitely does

change over time. If you do the same search result or same search I'm sorry key words, UM, you'll get different results sometimes from one day to the next, sometimes one morning to one afternoon. UM. It kind of depends upon the topic and whether or not, especially since Google will search across multiple UH features, like there's Google News where you'll get the latest articles. That's obviously going to change pretty rapidly compared to the more static web pages

that are about a general topic. Right, I mean a lot of people noticed a couple of months ago when Google will change the search results page because down the left side of the bar, now you've got you know, everything, news, images, books, blog, shopping and all those other topics. And people either loved

it or hated it. Um. I'm one of the people who happens to like it actually, But I mean that's that's a different Basically, they're grouping, they're sort of breaking it down for you into commonly searched topics like images. You can think of like the general search as pot pourri. It's everything, but you can break it down into smaller groups U. And another one that would might be of particular help to students is Google scholar, which allows you

to search scholarly articles, journals. UM. It allows you to look at patents, UH, and even legal opinions if you if you want to enable that, you can, and you can choose which options to enable and which ones to leave out. So if you don't want any results that have to do with patents, you can click a little checkbox and it will leave those results out. And UH,

that can definitely help you find specific scholarly articles about subjects. Now, I should hasten to add that does not necessarily mean that you'll be able to go to a link and read the article in full. Many of these journals are online have an online journal where you have to have a subscription in order to access that journal. So it maybe that you'll be able to read an excerpt, but you won't get the full article. In order to do that,

you'll need some other tool. A lot of schools, UM and a lot of library systems have a database or a search engine that's similar in style to Google, but specifically for this kind of thing, where you do get access to the full articles. UM. Depending on who designed that system, it may or may not be as user friendly as your as your general search engine, but you

may need access to something like that. Now, a lot of school systems do have this UH, so it's good to to find out if yours does, UM and and make use of it. We mentioned in a previous podcast about education and technology. Then in Georgia we have a system called Galileo, and in Galileo we can search these scholarly articles and get access to the full article without having a specific um uh subscription to that particular publication.

UM that that's really helpful now, granted, even then you're going to be limited by whatever range of journals that

particular service has access to. It's not necessarily going to have access to every single journal that is out there, but that that can sometimes pick up the slack that the Google will leave, because Google has no control over what the actual content is on these pages, and in some cases, like I said, it may just be an excerpt which can give you some helpful like guidance, but it's not going to give you the information you necessarily

need for an academic paper. There are a couple of things that I think we should address to now that we're getting into the more mature part of our podcast. So let's get that very web music in here. No no, no, wait, not that I was short of you using that as a euphemism as saying, we're slowly running out of time and probably should address some other things. Not alright, go Um. One of the things that I think we should address is quality of resources. Yes, actually, one of the things

I wanted to talk about was primary versus secondary. Yes. Yes, what I was basically getting into was, um, you know, as we have mentioned many many times in the podcast, especially during the education series, we do have a lot of listeners who are still in school, And I want to stress to all of you that not everything you read on the internet is accurate or yes, you have to keep in mind where the information is coming from, who it's coming from, and whether or not things may

have been biased. For example, maybe you're reading something that from a source that you do trust pretty well, and they say that a study financed by you know, the ACME Soup Corporation says that soup is beneficial to your eyesight, and you're going, okay, well, that's great. Apparently soup is beneficial to your eyesight. But and then you think about it. Wait a minute, the people funding the study have a soupy. They see a direct benefit from the increase of super

consumption exactly. So I mean, it may even be from a reasonably trusted resource, and maybe it came from a press release from the company, and perhaps it's true, but they do have a season for people to spread the good news about soup. Now, there does come a point where you eventually have to take that leap and and say that whoever it is that did that provide this information did so in good faith and without bias, Because ultimately all these when we think of scientific research and

or research in general. Really, the money to fund that research has to come from somewhere. Sure, and if you play the money tracing game to to ludicrous levels, it's going to seem like nothing out there is reliable. But there are some cases where this is far more obvious than others, where you're saying, Okay, well, this this particular study is suspect because it's directly funded by this company that has a vested interest, and the results of the

study seem to favor that company. That would be enough to maybe give you pause to say, maybe I need to find another study, not necessarily say that this one's wrong out of hand, but at least find some other um research out there that either corroborates or refutes the evidence of that particular study before just leaping on and saying Okay, this is what I'm going to use as a source on my paper. Yeah. Um, but I was going to. I did mention primary versus secondary sources. Some

of you may not really know what that means. Uh. We talked about a little bit in our our Wikis episode because we talked about how Wikipedia is not supposed to be used as a primary source. Primary source is Essentially, it's the originator of any particular data. It's the original source of some form of information. So a primary source could include a scientific report that summarizes a specific experiment.

That would be a good primary source. So that's a direct communication from the people who conducted the study to the people who are interested in reading about it. Now, a secondary source is kind of an intermediary. That's that's a source that's reporting or relaying that information, but it is not uh, directly responsible for creating that information. So, uh, Scientific American could be a good example here. Uh, they

do some excellent articles, but it's reporting. You know, most the articles in Scientific American would be something where it's reporting on a study and it's trying to report the results in a way that is um easily understandable by the readership of Scientific American. So it's still a secondary source if you want, if you want to cite a primary source, you need to actually go to the study that's mentioned in the secondary source and read it yourself.

Because whether we mean to or not, we have to filter information through our own uh you know, our own experiences, in our own understanding, right, and sometimes we're wrong because humans often are and so it's possible that a secondary source, even though they're trying to report on a primary source accurately, it could be inaccurate. You just in the sense of trying to summarize a report, you could end up being inaccurate. Yes,

And this happens all the time without bias. Now it can happen with bias too, but it it happens innocently all the time because it is really hard sometimes to summarize what a specific, uh scientific study is all about in a thousand words in a way that's understandable to your audience. So it's very important to try and go back to primary sources so that you can see what was actually said about the study. And here's something else I think it now would be a good time to

bring it up, because we're running out of time. Um, And that is, don't copy and paste stuff that you read on the internet or anywhere else for that matter. Plagiarism is bad. Plagiarism is bad. That's called plagiarism, as you may have guessed. And uh, that's the thing. If you find some useful information in a journal, say a peer of your journal science, um, you want to use that in your your report well, that's great, you can, but you need to give credit where credit is due.

Copying somebody else's words verbatim, even a couple of them, that's plagiarism. And you can even plagiarize yourself if you have written a paper and you go, oh, man, I did this paper last year and I totally this paragraph would be perfect for this new paper. Now, that's plagiarizing yourself. It has to be original. You can use it, but give credit to the person who who wrote it. And that's what the value the primary source to write. And the flip side of that coin is that, uh, you can't.

In most academic papers, you can't necessarily you can't just say that this is common understanding. Like any particular piece of information, UM, you have to be able to back up that information by providing a source that that that gives you the foundation to make that statement. This doesn't mean that you can't draw your own conclusion is from that information, but you can't just take something for granted and say, uh, this is true. You know, you have

to be able to back that up. This is why if you go to a site like Wikipedia, UM, you'll see often in these articles you'll see something like citation needed. It's because it Wikipedia is very focused on trying to present the best information possible. But that's you know, it's it's a work in progress and it always will be just based upon the nature of that tool, and citation needed just means that there needs to be a foundation to support the statement that was made in that article.

And without a foundation, you can't really make that statement because it could not it might not be true, you say, silent greenest people, but we need proof. Yeah, you know, it varies from person to person anyway. So uh, and we did say this in another podcast about Wikipedia and using Wikipedia as a worse and why a lot of teachers frown on that, And again, part of that is because it's all secondary. Wikipedia by its nature says it

cannot be used as a primary source. So if you conduct a scientific study, you can't use Wikipedia to publish your findings. Um, that's not what it's for. So Wikipedia is not necessarily a bad tool. It can definitely give you an understanding of a subject. But the best thing you can do is, once you get that understanding, dive down and find those primary sources. Because Wikipedia is really

just it's just a tool to get you started. Yeah, and I mean a lot of people thought we were are picking on Wikipedia, but it's the idea behind it is great, you know, being able to to contribute to scholarly research and and and getting an idea for what's going on with a particular topic. But the fact of the matter is, you know, things change over time. People can go in and mess with it just because they want to. It doesn't happen often, but it does happen.

And a lot of people have done serious work on trying to improve Wikipedia and make it more of a primary type resource. But in the end, you really need to go back and look at the sources to see where they got the information from, and you'll get an idea of how accurate you can really be with it. Yeah, just remember that, I mean, we talked a lot about this in terms of scientific studies because that's a pretty simple um example. But just remember that there are such

things as bad studies out there too. People get people have their studies retracted. I've heard several on the you know, there have been a few high profile, very famous one recently that I was very very happy about getting retracted out of the British School of our British Journal of Medicine. Yes, so that was a peer of you journal, and somebody might have written a paper based on that because it is,

you know, a peer. By the way, peer of you means that other doctors in this case had looked at the research and said, okay, well this article seems sound. Yeah it was. Well, experts have looked at it. Hey, it should be right right, right, and then occasionally they say, whoops, no, we were wrong, and this happened. That's what happened in this case. And that can happen in any kind of scientific journals, just medical. Um. So critical thinking is necessary

to do accurate research on the internet. Yeah, and it sounds like it's a lot of else. It sounds like it's a lot of work. But the nice thing about this is even though every individual paper that I ever had to write, I felt like, oh God, I can't believe I have to write another one of these. But ultimately it taught me to think and it taught me to really be critical when I was looking at information.

And that's a skill you can use everywhere, absolutely, and it makes you look good if you can do this, and it's not just in your academic career. Guys and and ladies as well. I got chastise in real life for using the term guys in a non gender specific form. It happens. Yeah, But at any rate, this is a skill you can use everywhere, like even something as simple as taking your car and to get worked on that.

Those critical thinking skills could be the difference between you getting you know, a a fifty dollar fix on something and a thousand dollar job that didn't need to be done. Um. You know it just it really does help you separate what is good information from what is bad. And really we use that all the time. And uh, so that was a really good discussion. I think I hope that Anne Marie liked that discussion about research. I hope that is useful to um. I believe that Marie is a teacher,

so I hope that's useful to your students. And I hope that that pleases you and fellow teachers. Uh. The internet is a wonderful resource. It is also full of stuff that is not as wonderful. So just use that critical thinking, use these tips that we gave you, and uh, and and that that will put you on a good start to getting some really strong information. So hopefully that's

a good help. If you have any suggestions for future topics, whether it's a ucation and technology or just technology in general,

you can write us. Our email address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com and Chris and I will talk to you again really soon if you're a tech stuff and be sure to check us out on Twitter tech Stuff hs ws R handle, and you can also find us on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash tech stuff h s W. For more on this and thousands of other topics, does how stuff Works dot com, and be sure to check out the new tech stuff blog now on the how Stuff Works homepage, brought to

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