Public Health's Digital Library: Using Google Search

When people are asked which search engine they use most often to meet their work-based information needs, Google is often the most popular choice. It has become many individuals default source of information on almost any topic. As of November 2005, over 46% of all online searches done by US home and work web surfers were performed on Google. Yahoo and MSN came in a distant second and third.

Google is wonderful... What could be easier than typing a few words, hitting the search button, and finding the answer to your question? A medical librarian at the University of British Columbia recently challenged Google to build “Google Medicine.” But until they do, you many want to explore some of Google’s more sophisticated search options:

Google Advanced
Google’s advanced search page offers several ways to help you construct more precise searches and end up with better search results. For example, did you know that if you place the tilde sign ("~") immediately in front of your search term, Google will search for your term and for its synonyms? To learn more go to Advanced Search Made Easy and print out the handy Google Cheat Sheet.
Google Scholar
In late 2004, Google released a new search engine: Google Scholar. Designed to search the scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations, it has quickly gained popularity. One interesting feature of Google Scholar is the “Cited by” link at the bottom of each search result; it identifies other papers that have cited articles in the group, helping you to find related information.
Google News
Google News has a number of features designed to simplify news searches, including email news alerts, top health stories, and a search history feature that allows registered users to access search results from any computer.

So why use anything else?

Despite Google’s ubiquity and user-friendliness, there are other search engines and databases that do some things better. Rather than a replacement for PubMed, Google Scholar and PubMed can be used together to improve the comprehensiveness of search results. Vivisimo clusters search results by subject, and Teoma, which recently merged with Ask.com, clusters results according to the meaning of different words in a query. Consider using a combination of these search engines to hit more evasive information targets. And always keep in mind the criteria for evaluating the accuracy of online information: there are no guarantees of accuracy or reliability on the Internet.

Quick Tips:

Looking for full text of an article? No search engine will guarantee that you will find it, but try putting the title in quotation marks and searching for it in Google or Google Scholar.
Even if you are not a UW affiliate, use UW HealthLinks when searching PubMed for a full text article. Use the Single Citation Matcher and display the results in Citation format. You will see buttons displayed that indicate if the article is available free online, through UW, or in print only.