Now that you finalized your search for periodicals using Michener's access to online databases, it is now time to venture onto the world wide web to find more research gems. While a google search will lend an amazing list of results, it certainly is not the end all of doing academic research.

Google Advantages:

• Plethora of results
• Does an extensive search of World Wide Web
• Allows uses to pin point and customize search
  • Conduct an Advanced Search
  • Use Google Scholar to search of journal articles, both published online and in traditional journals
  • Easy way to search for United States Government articles

Google Disadvantages:

• Too many hits, too hard to focus a general search
• Too haphazard
• Nonspecific
• Hits address general public

How to get the Best results out of a google search:

• Bring keywords, terminology, and authors' names to google
• Use its advanced features, scholarly search, and US Gov. search feature

Don't Use Google. Branch out; use other search engines:

All Search Engines. com

U of Cal Berkeley Search Engine List

U of Cal Berkeley Meta-Search Engines

Search Engine Watch.com

Other Online Resources

Informine: Browse or search by subject category to find scholarly articles

Evaluating Web Sites

Important things to consider when deciding the validity of a certain web site:

1. Sponsoring organization, company, educational institution, or branch of government
2. Timeliness of information: necessary to look for date last revised or updated, or copyright date
3. Carefully consider if .com is legitimate--compare general google search results with its gov. documents search
4. Web page design
5. Ease of Navigation
6. Quality of Writing
7. Email contact
8. Links within the site
9. Links outside the site
10. General academic quality of information on the web site