Googling 101—5 Things All Students Should Know

It’s a mark of a company’s popularity when the brand name becomes a verb. “Google” and “googling” made their way to the English lexicon in July 2006 and have since retained their meaning, despite the company branching out into other avenues. And despite the commonality of the term, our essay writers in the UK have noticed students often struggle with finding the right information via the search engine. They simply give up, assuming the information just isn’t there, instead of questioning their methods. Because googling is an art. Our company even had an applicant who added “googling” under their skills (yes, she’s hired—you’re reading her blog).

But why would you need to learn how to google? You will find the relevant information if you search for it enough, right?

Wrong.

Before we jump into the list, let’s clarify why it’s crucial to learn the skill of googling efficiently:

Why Is It So Important to Get Ahead with Google?

Let’s say you’re enrolled in a program, which requires you to put in 10 hours of work each semester. What if you find out there are ways to cut down that time to 5 hours instead? Wouldn’t you be interested? Of course, you would!

If you understand how to navigate Google waters, you’ll be better able to save time on research. It will also help you avoid a lot of frustration. Think of it this way: why are your parents so annoyed with smartphones? Answer: they’re not familiar with the features. The same is with googling. Suppose you don’t familiarise yourself with the full suite of features available on the platform. In that case, you’ll only get increasingly upset at why you can’t find the information you are looking for.

In this case, the most logical option is learning to search with Google.

5 Features of Google to Use for Research

And now, let’s get started with the list! As an essay writer online UK, I’ve carefully selected the features that will benefit you the most during your academic years. So, have a look!

1. Google Scholar

The number of students I’ve had to introduce this to is baffling. Google Scholar is your friend if you’re working on a paper and only need to find scientific journals relevant to your topic. For example, if your topic is “Discuss the impact of climate change on physical businesses”, you can simply plug in this title, and Google will list all relevant hits, including books and pdfs.

Moreover, you can automatically copy citations in the format you want if there’s a reference you would like to include! Simply click on the “Cite” link you can see here:

And this will give you a popup listing all the citations. Copy the style you need and just paste it into your document! Easy peasy!

Additionally, you can also pick the date or range you want in case you want to reference only the most recent articles or only go back three years, etc.

So, if you didn’t before, I’m sure you now understand the power of Google Scholar. So, go ahead and use it for all your writing tasks!

2. Use Quotations When Searching for Exact Terms

If you want to look for specific terms in their exact order, a regular Google search won’t help you much. However, magic happens when you put quotation marks around the terms you want to specify. Let’s take a quick example.

Suppose you need to look for sources that specifically talk about the importance of European languages to add as a reference. However, if you do a simple Google search, this is what you may get:

This may not be relevant to what you need since you’re not actually looking for the information, just the sources that mention this line. So now, if you use the quotation marks trick, this is what you get:

Much relevant to what you needed, right?

Let’s move on to the next.

3. Search for Specific File Types

There are times when you may only need specific file types. For example, pdfs, jpegs, etc. A regular search combines everything, so either you won’t find what you need in the mounds of information, or it will take you a lot of time.

Instead of this, specify the file type within your search. It will list down relevant results in the format you need. Here’s how you can do this:

Add filetype:<extension> to your original search term. For instance, if you want to look for presentation slides on coffee, you can use this: coffee filetype:ppt. This will list all PowerPoints on coffee, like so:

How cool is that? Try it now!

4. Exclude Terms from Your Search

You may get tasked with the toughest topics as a college or university student. One common issue you may have already faced includes getting irrelevant results because what you searched for can also refer to something else. Or maybe you don’t want a specific sub-topic to come up when you search for your main topic. Either way, you need a way to filter your search.

Of course, you can always do a regular Google search and skip all the irrelevant results, but if you want to be more efficient, you can do this:

Search term -excluding term

Let’s take an example. Suppose you’re a fashion student and need to look for some design tutorials. However, you don’t want the graphic design searches to show up as they do in a regular search:

So, you can use this tip, and voila! No Illustrator search results anymore!

You can use this tip for any of your topics. Try it out and enjoy getting targeted results you don’t have to scroll past because they’re irrelevant.

1. Combine Terms with Boolean Operators

Now that you know how to subtract certain search results, how about learning to do the opposite?

Well, there are two techniques I have in my purse of Google-lore. The first is using the AND operator.

In this case, you can just combine two terms you really want the search results to include. Some people confuse this with the quotation technique, so let’s explain the difference: AND operation only ensures the results include the two terms. These could be anywhere on the web page. On the other hand, Quotation marks specify the term to be in that exact order on the webpage. So, “dress pants” may give you results like this:

While dress AND pants will give you results like this:

The other tip is to use OR.

You can use the OR operator if you want results that include both terms together or individually. Have a look at the example below:

Important note: AND and OR operators are not case-sensitive, so using them in lowercase (and, or) will work just fine.

Last Word

We hope these tips help you improve your googling skills and save precious time. But if you ever need an essay writer online UK to take care of tasks, our reliable service is there for you.