Library tutorial for Humanities and Social Sciences

Section 6. Effective Internet Searching

• Web search engines
• Advanced search
• Evaluating web sites

Web search engines

The Internet can be a very useful source of information but it is only one source of information. Publishers protect their reputation by verifying the accuracy and integrity of what they publish but anyone can publish on the Internet so the information found there needs to be carefully scrutinised.

Google is the most widely used search engine but there are others. No one search engine will find all sites on the Internet.

Some other Search Engines can be found under Resouce Guides on the Library's home page - look on the left of the screen - Searching the Web

Advanced search

Large and irrelevant results are common with simple or basic searches using search engines so look for ways to refine your search to get more relevant and manageable results:

• use Advanced or Power search options rather than simple keyword searches - most search engines will have this feature so look for the link to it
  
• Advanced Search options allow you to refine and limit your search to get more relevant results - View this short online tutorial on using Google Advanced Search
• the Library web pages on Searching the Web Effectively have more information on searching techniques
• Google Scholar provides a way to broadly search for scholarly literature across many disciplines and academic sources. Search results in Google Scholar often provide links to the Library's journal subscriptions (use the Advanced Scholar option for more precise searching):
  N.B - if using a remote computer, you need to access Google Scholar on the Library website to link to our licenced resources - authentication will be required.

Tourism dilemmas for Aboriginal Australians - Full-Text @ Uni Adelaide J Altman - Annals of Tourism Research, 1989 - cababstractsplus.org ... economic development of north Australia. Several key destinations in the Northern Territory are located on Aboriginal land and the cu. ... Cited by 50 - Web Search - Import into EndNote

Evaluating Web sites

Learn not to take at face value the material you find on the Internet. Anyone can put anything on the Internet, so quality can vary from highly useful and reliable to trivial and inaccurate. In general we expect most education (.edu), government (.gov) and well respected organisations (.org) to produce reliable information. The main aim of a commercial (.com) site is to promote or sell and these websites should be carefully evaluated before using the information.

These are some basics to consider to assess the quality and reliability of any Internet source:

• Authors: expertise/ qualifications/ affiliations - may not be who, or what, they claim to be 
• Date: old material can be scanned or entered on web pages without reference to the date the document was originally produced
• Currency: has the page been updated? - eg: latest statistics
• Bias:  does the site promote a single point of view (bias) such as: commercial; political; religious; cultural, etc?
• Source: look at the URL (web address) - is the page hosted by an educational institution (.edu), a commercial site (.com), a government department (.gov), or is it a personal web page?

This Library web page has more detail on evaluating web resources.

Always reference all information found on the internet so that readers of your essay/report can make their own evaluation of the website.

End of tutorial!