Skip to Main Content

Library Services for High School Students: Google

Guide for library resources available to high school students

Google

Google is a great place to begin searching, because it has an easy, familiar interface, and searches the whole internet for information. Unfortunately, this also means that it returns a lot of information that won't be suitable for use in your assignments. 

There are ways to better your chances of finding high quality sources using Google. In particular, the Google 'Advanced Search' will allow you to limit the results you find, to eliminate poor quality resources. 

Advanced Google Searching

Try searching in google for the term "business ethics"You'll see a lot of results, but many will not be suitable for your studies. Some may be too old to be used in academic writing, and some may be written by people who are not experts.

Now, on the results page under the search bar click the "settings" link, and select "advanced search", as shown in the image below.

Using the advanced search feature, we can now limit our results. We can choose to limit by date or region to ensure the information we find is relevant.

We can also choose a particular domain we would like to search in. For example, we can choose to limit our results to those ending in the gov.au or edu.au domains, meaning we would only see results from government departments or educational institutions, like schools and universities. This is a great way of removing resources with unreliable authors. 

Try it Now

Google Web Search

Try searching for your topic, and see how many results you find. Are they all good quality? Are there too many to read all of them?

Open the advanced search settings, and see if you can change your search criteria to improve the results you received. Were you able to shorten your list? Do you get better results??