Speaker 1: Hi, so quick story that's probably going to make me feel pretty ancient. So summer after my junior year of high school, I decided to take a couple of college level classes for college credit. And so one day I walked into the giant beautiful university library and I sat behind what at the time was like a state of the art computer and a friend of mine who was taking the classes with me said, check this out, type in yahoo.com and in that search box, just like put anything you want, anything you want to research. And that was the first time I used a search engine. I thought this was incredible that I could just go in there and search whatever I wanted at any time. So twice a week when I would go take classes in between classes, I would sit at the computer and I would just think like, what am I going to research today? And I would type whatever came to mind, elephants, and I would start reading all of the information that I could in like the hour and a half, two hours that I had between classes. And when I think back on that, I still think that it's pretty amazing that we all have this kind of access to information. The issue is that because information is so vast and so widely available now, there are some negatives that come with that. The problem is that we don't necessarily access all factual or logical information. And so that's what we're going to talk about today. Because when we do research on Google, we end up using sometimes a lot of sources that are not in fact reliable or appropriate for academic purposes. Googling is like grocery shopping. When you go grocery shopping, normally you shop for the things that you're used to eating, the things that you like, the things that you've probably grown up eating. So you grab some pasta, you grab some fruits and veggies. You probably also grab some junk food. You are reaching for things that feel familiar, that feel comfortable, and that you know. Now if you were to walk into that same grocery store as, let's say, a chef or a registered dietician, you're going to be approaching that shopping process very differently. If you're a registered dietician, you are looking for foods that are high in nutritional value, that are probably lower in fat, lower in sugars. If you're grabbing some pasta, you might be looking for 100% whole wheat pasta rather than white pasta. And if you're a chef, you're also looking for high-quality ingredients, things that are particularly flavorful, maybe the freshest products that are currently in season and that are perhaps more local. You might be picking out a package of food and actually bothering to read the ingredients and to read the nutrition label rather than just grab the products that you normally eat. So this is similar to how we Google because as the sort of everyday customer, you pop into Google and you just do your basic search and you ask it questions, it gives you some answers, you start clicking on those first few hits. Wikipedia will probably be one of the ones up there and let's be honest, you normally don't get past the first page of hits. But if you are Googling for academic purposes, let's say to write an academic paper for a college class, then you have to be approaching that process differently. Don't just grab whatever seems nice or whatever seems like it might taste good or that you understood that article well. You are approaching it as an academic. You're trying to find the quality sources, the most reliable sources. And so you have to be a lot pickier about what it is that you're looking for. So let's go back to our grocery store. If you're walking in there as the educated consumer, you might have a short list of key things that you're looking for and you want to make sure everything falls into the category of good proteins or complex carbs or fruits and vegetables that you know are providing a lot of antioxidants, for example. So what would be the Googling equivalent of that? You are going to be looking at the URL endings to start with. So .com, it's out of the question. .com is junk food. We're not buying the junk food. Remember .com means commerce. And if someone's trying to maybe sell you something, it's not something you probably want to use for academic purposes. .net, you can also leave those out of your cart. So you want to stick with .org, .gov, and .edu. .org are organizational websites. .gov is official government information and .edu are educational institutions. So you want to basically eliminate anything that doesn't fall into those categories. Sure, there are some exceptions here or there, depending what type of paper you're writing and what the exact source is. But since we can't go through every single possible example in the world, it's much easier for you to just eliminate anything that is not those three. And that will significantly already narrow your search and make you much more likely to be finding reliable information. Now did you know that you can actually filter the results that you get on Google? You can filter for those URL endings so that you only get .org or only get .gov or only get .edu. Okay, so here we are on Google. Now let's say that you're writing a paper on bipolar disorder for your psychology class. Let's go ahead and type bipolar disorder into Google. And this is how we usually begin our search, right? Just very general and broad. And as we learn more, then our search terms get a bit more specific. So let's see what we get. We have National Institute on Mental Health, that's a .gov. So that's probably a good source. MayoClinic.org, that's also reliable. Healthline.com is a source you're probably going to want to avoid. Then we have the National Alliance on Mental Illness, that's a .org, that one's probably okay. I'm going to skip all those top stories there. WebMD.com, you're definitely going to want to avoid. So you can start to get the picture. It's not that hard for you to filter yourself when you're Googling for these kinds of articles. However, you can have Google do the filtering for you. So in your search box, if instead of just typing the search term, you type the search term and then afterwards you write the word sites, and then a colon, don't put any spacing here, dot. And then let's say that we just want to see the .edu websites, .edu, then hit enter. And we've got stanford.edu, health.harvard.edu. If you scroll down, you'll see that every single source you get is a .edu website. Now if ever you run across something that says ad, that means that somebody has paid for this to be here. So please ignore anything that says ad, but everything else will be a proper .edu source. You can do the same exact thing with a .gov search, for example. Here you go, .gov, .gov, .gov, .gov, and so forth. You could do the same thing with a .org search. So this is my biggest tip for finding more reliable sources on Google. Now if you Google the term refine web searches, and you click here on refine web searches Google search help, you're going to find a number of other useful little tricks that might be good for you depending on what it is you're looking for and what kind of paper you're writing. So to sum up, don't Google for junk food, find the good stuff, and in the next part of this video series we're going to be talking about Google's much more academic cousin. It's called Google Scholar.