The Goal of an Online Search is to get the right information, of the necessary quality in a reasonable amount of time. So how do we do that without just wadding through vast amounts of results. The main thing we want to do is to developed a strategy to make our searches the most efficient.
The Needle and the Haystack.
Some times online and database searches feel like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. So how do you make it more efficient?
VRHS Library subscribes to databases of all kinds, from general reference to subject specific. These database provide access to a wide variety of articles from magazines, newspapers and academic journals, as well as information form academic and professional reference sources, without all the "junk" of the internet.
| Phrase search | " " | To search for a group of words in an exact order, | "Martin Luther King, Jt" or "search engine" "the band that sang hold your head up" |
| Site search | site: | To limit searchs to a particular site or domain Pair with -to eliminate hits from a site or domain |
site:gov site:npr.org -site:.com |
| File type | Filetype: | To limit results to certain file types |
Filetype:pdf |
| In Url or In title |
Inurl: Intitle: |
Limit results to those with terms in either the URL or webpage title |
Inurl:equal justice initiative intitle:martin luther king |
* To find a search term within a page, use the "find" feature on the web browser (CRTL+F command)