Google research in various examples

Nota: Textul e in engleza, l-am publicat pentru o revista scolara. Ca atare n-o sa gasiti chestii ilegale prin el. Si e si in engleza. Dar m-am gindit ca poate prinde bine.

The first thing you need to do is choose a theme of your interest that you’d like to do research about. For our basic needs, I’ve chosen Edgar Allan Poe as object of research. The following examples will show various types of approach for such research.

Maybe the most common thing you can type in Google is the name of the object you’d like to find more about.

Edgar Allan Poe

As this type of search would bring millions of result pages, you might want to try to narrow it down. Usually people do it by adding another word that they deem significant for their research.

Edgar Allan Poe life

This should bring more results focused on the life of author E. A. Poe. However, there are still millions of them. If your research is not too meticulous and any page of biography would do, you can, of course, settle for the first results that Google will provide, which is most likely coming from Wikipedia.com or from Biography.com.

If, however, the research is oriented towards more particular aspects of his life and work, you can have a different approach to it.

“life of Edgar Allan Poe”

Adding quotes to your search will make sure that the pages returned feature only that specific content.

“Edgar Allan Poe” “did you know”

This type of search will return the pages that contain short and probably the most interesting facts about the life of the author, grouped in a chart-like order.

“Edgar Allan Poe” study OR essay

This search will focus on pages that contain studies or essays on the subject. The operator OR will distinguish between the two particular terms, returning only pages that contain either the term “study” or the term “essay” in their text.

“Edgar Allan Poe” study OR essay filetype:pdf

If you are interested into finding a study on E. A. Poe that has a certain literary form and perhaps was even published at some point in a specialty magazine, you can opt for bringing the filetype operator into your search. This operator will make sure that your results will only consist of certain document types (like PDF – for Adobe texts, DOC – for Microsoft Word texts, PPT – for Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, XLS – for Microsoft Excel presentations, TXT – for simple text pages). As you might know, the PDF format has been a requirement for many official texts or transcripts, so the chance of finding some notable works about your subject is increased.

If the range of results is still too wide, you can also opt for other Google operators in order to refine it.

intitle:“Edgar Allan Poe” study OR essay filetype:pdf

The above-exemplified search query contains the operator intitle. This is used when we want to make sure that the documents that are returned by Google contain the subject we need in the title of the page. That will refine the search considerably – as this time the chances of getting results that are referring to E. A. Poe only briefly, in the corpus of the text, are low to none. The results returned will contain the subject in their page title.

In case the research we are conducting needs to exclude some words (like, for instance, we’re searching for essays on the short stories written by Poe, but we want to exclude the essays that deal with his poetry, we could rule out certain names).

intitle:“Edgar Allan Poe” study OR essay -Annabel filetype:pdf

In the example above, by using the minus sign, we have excluded the word “Annabel” (part of the title of a famous poem written by Poe), thus eliminating most of the occurrences that lead to poetry-oriented studies. We can also rule out the word “poetry” – but we don’t really want to do that. Why? Because in most of the texts that deal with his works, we assume that at some point E. A. Poe will also be remembered as a poet, for his poetry. If we were to take the word out, we would actually cut short some of our possibility of finding a relevant text about his life and works.

There are also other approaches to the subject. We can, for instance, specify the type of website that we would like our research to point to.

intitle:“Edgar Allan Poe” study OR essay site:edu

Bearing in mind the .edu websites (the web-pages that are hosted on .edu domains) are usually dealing with educational, scientific or various intellectual issues, we could state as a rule for our search to filter out the results coming from other websites.

The only problem is that the .edu domain is a public domain, where – as in most public domains – spam websites have also found a place. A spam website is usually build either in order to sell something to the public, or to draw attention to its content (which usually consists out of various ads and, sometimes, even harmful scripts – viruses, Trojans, pop-ups, and so on). Google is not making its business to filter out such websites; first because they are a part of the Internet, and Google’s search queries are general and intend to cover the entire web, and second because a part of Google’s business is to reward websites that acquire a lot of visitors, by bringing them upward in the results section. Well, spam websites are smart and tricky; they know how to draw visitors and how to go up in Google’s rankings. It’s our job to eliminate them from our search.

A way to rule out the spammers is by ruling out the words they are most likely to use.

intitle:“Edgar Allan Poe” study OR essay site:edu -buy -cheap -download

As you can see, we’ve excluded the words “buy”, “cheap” and “download” – very common on spam websites – from our query. You should know, though, that in most cases “download” is not a would you should exclude, as most good websites offer, on some pages, some items for downloading, in this case, when the object of our search are texts and documents that aren’t downloadable but published online, it makes sense.

The above-mentioned search query will return more specific results. If you would like, however, to expand the area of such results, in case it’s too narrow (with several words excluded and restriction placed on all other websites except for .edu domain it might be just a little too narrow) you could, this time, eliminate the words “study” and “essay”. There are enough texts out there dedicated to Edgar Allen Poe that aren’t necessarily considered studies or essays. So, such a search query as the following might be just what you need in order to obtain significant results.

intitle:“Edgar Allan Poe” site:edu -buy -cheap -download

Other types of search queries related to your investigation could be:

intitle:“Edgar Allan Poe” ebooks -buy -cheap

This search query aims to find online literature samples or full books written by E. A. Poe. As you can observe, the term download has not been excluded, as that would mean avoiding the resources that offer free-of-charge literature for downloading. Also the site:edu operator was removed, as we focus our search on the entire web content. However, for a more accurate range of results, you might even consider ruling out the word Amazon – thus aiming at web pages that offer exclusively free content.

intitle:“Edgar Allan Poe” audiobooks -buy -cheap

This query is about finding audio-books. Same procedure as above.

Some of our investigations aim at finding the right book for reading, in which case we need to provide the title. I have found useful sometimes to just use the author’s last name instead of the full name (because in some pages Poe might appear as Edgar Allan Poe, in some others as Edgar Allen Poe, and in some other simply as E.A.Poe). This, together with the correct title and with the site operator would refine the search to the maximum. In almost all cases this would produce a correct result in the top 3 returns by Google. For instance

Poe “The fall of the house of Usher” site:scribd.com OR site:manybooks.net OR site:gutenberg.org

would be the right option for the people that don’t have too much time to spend on experimenting Google’s choices. Listed above, in the search query, are the three most known websites for free online literature. Even though Scribd.com requires registration (and, in some cases, a personal upload of a textbook) the works presented here are free and downloadable in multiple formats (pdf’s, doc’s, txt’s).

BLOGS AND DISCUSSION FORUMS
If you would just like to find out what non-specialists or bloggers have to say about the subject of your search, you can always check out the blogs:

“Edgar Allan Poe” site:wordpress.com OR site:blogspot.com

This will return results from bloggers’ pages.

“Edgar Allan Poe” inurl:viewtopic OR inurl:showthread

will return results from discussion forum pages. As you may notice, the operator we’ve used is inurl – an operator that is meant to return results that have the word we indicate in the web address of the page.

GOOGLE SCHOLAR
A good alternative for the main Google search section would be the use of it’s Scholar section (located at http://scholar.google.com/ ). This section already presents a refined string for document searching, eliminating the spam and amateur websites and returning results from within specialty websites (literature, arts, science). Most of the authors are teachers, educators or students, so the materials listed here definitely come from an authorized source. The only inconvenient, for some of the results, would be that they are incomplete, requiring the reader to pay for full access. Even so, this is a good place to do research on several topics. Just typing

“Edgar Allan Poe”

in the search query should be enough to return thousands of studies and essays written on the topic. Some of the main pages returned are also works by E. A. Poe. If you don’t want to use those, you can just type

“Edgar Allan Poe” -author:Poe

in the search field, and voila: all the works ON Edgar Allan Poe will be listed, minus his own works.

IMDB
If you would like to find out if the celebrity you’re researching has been involved in any type of movie-making, you can tell Google to look for it in the Internet Movie Database.

“Edgar Allan Poe” site:imdb.com/name

Note that Google (as well as the author of these lines) is not responsible for the content of the pages you find. Some of them may be harmful to the computer or feature un-copyrighted content, some may be missing or replaced. However, with the help of such query strings as above, you will be able to increase your chances of finding good and useful results.

Good luck with your Google research!