{"id":6119,"date":"2025-01-29T09:00:57","date_gmt":"2025-01-29T14:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/lawlibrary\/?p=6119"},"modified":"2025-01-28T16:32:20","modified_gmt":"2025-01-28T21:32:20","slug":"google-2-0-improving-your-internet-searches","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/lawlibrary\/?p=6119","title":{"rendered":"Museday Tuesday – Google 2.0 – Improving Your Internet Searches"},"content":{"rendered":"

As the clich\u00e9 goes \u2013 searching the Internet is both a blessing and a curse.\u00a0 A blessing in that a vast amount of information is available free of charge.\u00a0 A curse because a vast amount of information is available free of charge.\u00a0 The typical Google search can return millions if not billions of hits. And sadly,\u00a0 According to most studies, only a very small percentage of users, typically\u00a0less than 10%, go beyond the first page of Google search results, with estimates often placing it around 0.44% of users who visit the second page.\u00a0<\/span><\/span> So how do you winnow down the results to ensure your best, most reliable results end up on the first page?<\/p>\n

One of the first things you can do is apply the Boolean search techniques you use on Westlaw or Lexis.\u00a0 If you are searching for a concept, you can put the words in quotes so Google will recognize that you are search for a phrase.\u00a0 Otherwise Google will turn your search into an “or” search.\u00a0 I.e.\u00a0 Age discrimination will search for age or discrimination, “age discrimination” searches for these words as a phrase.<\/p>\n

The best thing I can do is limit my search by domain.\u00a0 I can specify that I only want information on age discrimination published by a government source.\u00a0 A source I can count on for authentic information on a legal topic.\u00a0 To limit by domain, I add the word site with a colon after it and them the domain I want to restrict my search to.\u00a0 In this case site:.gov.\u00a0 I now know that the information I found a reliable, authentic representation of the law.<\/p>\n

I can take advantage of the coding website developers do.\u00a0 Every website in its metadata has a title field. What words did the developer of the website think was so important they would use it as the title of the webpage.\u00a0 The search would read intitle:”age discrimination.\u201d\u00a0 What if instead of looking for my search terms in the title I searched for my terms in the URL?\u00a0 Again, the developer of the page must have thought that word or concept was important if they placed in the address field of the webpage.<\/p>\n

Always take advantage of other people’s work.\u00a0 One of the things librarians love to do is to provide finding aids for their students and faculty.\u00a0 Things that list the major sources of law in a particular area.\u00a0 We call those things bibliographies or libguides. And we always make these things available on the net.\u00a0 Other academics publish what are know as white papers, an exploration of all of the aspects of a particular topic.\u00a0 Adding those words to your search terms will get you fewer but more relevant results.\u00a0 My search inurl:”age discrimination\u201d site:edu bibliography gets me pages from highly respected law schools; schools whose information I can rely on.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As the clich\u00e9 goes \u2013 searching the Internet is both a blessing and a curse.\u00a0 A blessing in that a vast amount of information is available free of charge.\u00a0 A curse because a vast amount of information is available free<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2913,"featured_media":6122,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36494,508],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-library-news","category-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/lawlibrary\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/lawlibrary\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/lawlibrary\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/lawlibrary\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2913"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/lawlibrary\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6119"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/lawlibrary\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7092,"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/lawlibrary\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6119\/revisions\/7092"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/lawlibrary\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/lawlibrary\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/lawlibrary\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/lawlibrary\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}