You have by now heard about the dangers of using Google to search for research-quality resources. Maybe your instructor has steered you to the GSC Discovery Service, our digital library of research-quality resources, but still you say- Why not Google? The purpose of this page is to outline when using Google is the perfect tool for your research, and when you should avoid it.
Note: these are guidelines and not intended to circumvent whatever instructions your instructor has provided.
Google is first a search engine. It uses sophisticated algorithms (step-by-step complex procedures that a computer can follow and duplicate) to identify the information you are seeking. Much of the way Google’s search engine works is proprietary information.
There are a growing number of legitimate research guides, full-text collections, and other scholarly tools on the free Web worth exploring. The challenge, with hundreds of millions of indexed sites, is finding the right ones. Fortunately, there are a number of search techniques that you can use to refine their Google search results.
Linked here is a research guide that addresses the following topics:
