The Art & Science of Googling A Primer for Academia Achuthsankar S Nair University of Kerala

1. Introduction Internet is an unbelievably huge source of information on almost any topic you can think of, good and bad. It is said that if you print out all the information available on the internet and pile up the papers, it will be almost 600 Km tall ! There are then ‘unprintable’ (sorry for the pun !) videos and audios and softwares. Searching for the specific information you need from this cauldron of information is really an art and a science. Some of the skills for efficient searching can be taught, but some also needs to be acquired through constant practice. Teachers, researchers and students also need to realize that search for academic purposes is a different cup of tea, as compared to general purpose search. In this article, we discuss some helpful tips in this regard after introducing some general information. Let me begin by saying a few things aimed at the computer novice. You need not have any great computer skill to use the internet. If you want to use it on your own, you need basic mouse skills (this is a psychomotor skill, it has nothing to do with technology know-how, just like car driving has nothing to do with understanding thermodynamics, that is why the lesser educated adults learn driving faster !) and a few hours hand-holding from anyone who knows to use a PC. A very important point is that, if you are using a mobile phone, you are already exposed to many PC concepts and you are at a great advantage. The mobile phone is actually a janata PC. 2. Internet & Searching in a nut shell In a nut shell, here is what you need to know about the Internet: •

Internet offers a huge number of documents. Each source of information is identified by a web site address which is similar in function to a channel number in a cable TV network. Here is a typical address: www.kerala.gov.in

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Anatomy of a web site address: www.xxxxxx.yyy.zz xxxxx Æ Subject yyy Æ Domain: com/co, org, edu/ac/res, gov, net, mil, tv, norm, biz zz Æ Country: in, pk, lk, sg, my, jp, ko, uk, fr, cz, de, ru, ca, us, ae Most are obvious, an exception – de: Germany Examples: www.who.org, www.mit.edu, www.keralauniversity.edu www.kerala.gov.in, www.sooryakiran.com, www.cds.res.in www.ugc.ac.in, www.psychology.com, www.ibm.com, www.swathithirunal.in

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To start work on the internet, you must get access to a PC that is connected on the internet already. Locate on the computer screen the icon (small picture representing a software) of the browser, a software required to get onto the internet. There are a few different browsers, but mostly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox are mostly popular. Move the mouse so that the cursor comes over the above picture (icon). Then click the left mouse button. You will see the background of the picture darkening. Now double-click (if you find this difficult, just press the Enter Key in the keyboard) and the browser will start up. Type the web site address of your choice as indicated in the following picture and press Enter key. (It is likely that the browser will be set to start off with some web page, known as its home page. You can stop that by pressing the stop button. Click on the space for typing address and then type address of your choice over it. Web Site Address Search box

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You need to either know a useful address in your subject area (say, which you saw in a text book/told to you by your friend) or you need to know an address of a special web site which helps you to locate information. They are known as search engines (they are just special purpose web sites) and analogous to a library catalogue. Here is the one I recommend (in fact anyone might recommend this): www.google.com (An alternate address is www.google.co.in).

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You can now type the word indicating the topic of your interest (search keyword) in the long rectangular area, known as the search box, and click on the button

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Suppose you type the word Kerala University and click on the search button, you will see the result as follows (please note that this was done in 2001):

You see that there are 43,200 documents with reference to Kerala University and the first one is the official web site of the University (www.keralauniversity.edu). All underlined words are called links. If you click on them, you will see full details (If you move mouse over links, they will change shape to a pointing hand). To move back and forth between pages you have visited, use these buttons left of your browser window:

at the top

3. SEARCHING TIPS We now discuss search tips, with specific reference to academics. Searching basically involves throwing an appropriate key-word into the Google search box and then going through and choosing from among the results displayed. However, Google usually throws up hundreds of thousands of documents and it may not be an easy job to sieve through them. Instead, if we judiciously select keywords, we may hit the jackpot earlier and with less frustration. The first point to note, for academicians, is that their requirements are very different from that of a casual searcher of the web. For instance, the word “Holography” if searched for, will throw up links which relate to business information regarding it, which is inappropriate for a class room lecture or academic study. Here are some tips that will help you out of the situation.

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Add tails: Adding certain phrases along with keywords will influence the search in a great way. Here are some suggessions: tutorial/ primers (to get self-study lucid learning material. Note: for dummies, a trade mark of certain publisher is seen used freely by some authors to indicate very basic nature of tutorials and also to indicate the candid and humorous approach), PPT/slides (to get power point slides on the topic), handout (to get lecture hand-outs), teaching/learning resources/links (to get material specifically handpicked by experts for educational/training purpose), journals, exam papers(for sample question papers), syllabus, demo softwares (especially in case of science topics) and video.

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Variety: Do not be stuck with the straight-forward phrase that came to your mind first. For instance, if you are searching for “educational technology’, try rephrasing it to, say, “computers in education”, “information technology and education”, “technology-enabled education etc”. Also think of using related words/phrases. For example: Cryptography & Data Compression, Swathi Thirunal & Maharaja of Travancore, Quality & Excellence, University Education & Higher Education

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Operators: Google ignores common words and characters such as a, an, the etc. If you want to force Google to use them, you can do so by putting a " +" sign in front of it (Note the space before +) To search for a word and also its synonyms, place the tilde sign ("~") before your key word. For instance, the keyword ~development will look for also growth and expansion. There are more.

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Planning your Search: Your creativity on search keywords may dry up fast if you do not plan your search on paper. Write down possible keywords and additional phrases on a paper before approaching Google.

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Beware of Adult Content: If you are a novice, be warned that Internet has lot of adult content. Some keywords may throw up objectionable material, by mere coincidence. Get some one to advice you on how to use “Safe Search” in Google. (In case you intentionally search for adult material, please be aware that the keywords you use and the sites you visit are all promptly recorded on your PC. Use the option to “Clear Private Data/Clear History” in the browser to remove this. Please also be aware that your internet service provider can still have a record of these – this is OK as long as the materials were not used in an objectionable way, like it being distributed with malicious intentions etc).

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Practice makes Perfect: If you are keen to develop your Googling skills, then practice and explore continuously.

In addition to basic search as described above, Google provides a number of services which can help academicians. Image search is an example. If you select the “Images” link just above the search box, you can search for images to use in your articles/presentations/notice. Please be aware that many of the images you see will be copyrighted and may require you to seek permission before using it, especially in publications. Shown below is a search for images related to educational technology

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Another interesting search facility is the Google Book Search (books.google.com). This lets you search for books in the area indicated by your key word and presents the book information graphically as shown below (second) for the word “bioinformatics”. You can even read some (in certain cases, many) pages of the book.

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There is then the special search facility meant exclusively for academics – Google Scholar (scholar.google.com). This searches among scholarly publications and typically lists research papers and scholarly articles in the domain of your keyword. You can either give the subject keyword or author keyword. In the screen below, for the word “Travancore”, it not only lists scholarly articles, but on the left, we can find even prominent researchers in the field like Dick Kooiman and Robin Jeffry listed.

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www.scholar.google.com also displays citations, for instance, the first article in the above screen is shown “cited by 10”, if we click on this link, we can see the respective articles which cited this. Many articles are available as freely downloadable abstracts (IEEE publications being a important exception) and some with freely downloadable full-text. The idea of providing open access to research publications is catching up fast and there is a sizeable number of journals which have adopted this, the best example being PLoS publications (Public Library of Science). Scholar facility also lets one arguably gauge the scholarship of academicians (this is not a perfect way, and needs to be interpreted carefully). Dr P R Sudhakaran, a leading researcher from Kerala University shows up in Google Scholar as follows. The 312 publications listed need not all be authored by Dr P R Sudhakaran (this being a popular name, many other researchers by the name can be included in this list). Also, all publications of Dr P R Sudhakaran may not be there in this list.

It may also be noted that Google provides advanced search facilities. Choose this link in the basic Google page and see the advanced features including searching for pages: • • • • • • • • • •

that contain ALL the search terms you type in that contain the exact phrase you type in that contain at least one of the words you type in that do NOT contain any of the words you type in written in a certain language created in a certain file format that have been updated within a certain period of time that contain numbers within a certain range within a certain domain, or website that don't contain "adult" material

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In addition, you can use query modifiers in Google. For instance, using the phrase define: before a keyword will provide a definition of the key word. Using allintitle: before the keyword will restrict the results to those with all of the query words in the title. Eg: [allintitle: India Technology] will return only documents that have both "India" and "Technology" in the title. Similar is intitle, which works with a single word allinurl: and inurl: are similar, and look for the keyword(s) in the web site address rather than the document. There are so many other facilities that Google provides including newsgroups, blogs, patents, news etc. Newsgroups are an ideal way to network with people of similar interests. You can search for groups related to your interests. Some groups are closed, many others are open. If you post a question to such groups, you will be offered help from a number of people from around the world. Finally, please remember that a search engine may not be covering all resources that may be appropriate for you. For searching on the internet, you must be driven by a divine discontent, keep searching, on and on, a golden nugget might be buried somewhere in the cyberspace, the key is, the keyword you use ! © Dr Achuthsankar S Nair: 2002-2007: This article can be copied verbatim and distributed freely under the condition that this notice is retained.

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