Nick's top Google tips

I'll admit - I'm just like everyone else. Despite the wealth of electronic scholarly resources available to me, Google is my top research tool.

I do have various tips and techniques I use to get what I want out of Google. These aren't revolutionary but in case they are useful, here are a few:

Restrict search to .ac.uk or .edu websites

I often use site:.ac.uk or site:.edu - why do I do this? I'll generally get a good result. I work at a university and I'm interested in what others are doing. That's just relevant to me, but more broadly universities are full of very intelligent cutting-edge researchers who openly share their ideas. Finally there isn't much web junk (eg comment spam and affiliate websites) in the academic domain.

Restrict search to ppt filetypes

ppt are powerpoint files. Use filetype:ppt to only view presentations. Why do I find that helpful? Again, you don't get much spam in presentations. Even better - presentations are short. I'm lazy, I'm in a hurry - I just want the key ideas. That's what you get in a presentation.

Try combining both of these: for example put "user centered design filetype:ppt site:.edu" into Google and you get the presentation I recommended in my last blog post. That wasn't how I originally found it though - I used my third technique:

Search by name or email address.

Follow the person rather than the idea. In literature searches people are used to searching by author name, but they don't do it so often on the web. If you find one person with a good idea and follow the links you could find a whole community.

(Incidentally - if you've never searched on your own name or email in Google, do so now before your future employer or date does. But that's another story...)