What are the key skills to being a savvy internet researcher? Where do most of you find your info? Is google enough to find anything you want, or do you need multiple starting points?
I’m always looking for health stuff… and WebMD fails time and time again for me. What are some good starting points for health and fitness, specifically?
I breezed through the reference list in GQ, those are some good starting points, but they fail me all the time.
Thanks for your help, I need it!
Observation: Health and fitness produce throngs of gurus giving you the benefit of their knowledge, on the Web and personally. These gurus freely contradict each other.
WAG: To be a good researcher, you need to know about the subject in real life. Then you can deal competently with the facts, perspectives, guesses, and hustles that are out there.
Suggestion: You begin by building yourself a foundation by learning physiology, nutrition, sports medicine, etc, from professors and textbooks that meet standards. You can do this to the extent desired, whether to a hobby level, or, for not much more effort (just a more methodical approach), to a professional level.
Google is The One True Search Engine; if you can’t find it on Google, then you probably don’t need to find it at all.
Google is getting worse, though. I have to wade through a lot of noise on the first several pages now to find any signal.
http://www.findlaw.com is an excellent resource of free legal information for laypersons.
See Mary Ellen Bates’ web site at
http://www.batesinfo.com/index.html
She wrote (well co-authored) “Researching Online For Dummies.”
Thanks.
Hey, maybe I should be looking past the first 2 pages of Google more often? I usually tend to think that if there isn’t anything on the first two pages, then there won’t be anything useful… maybe that’s my problem right there?
The other skill is being able to tweak your search. If two words gets you three zillion hits, what third word do you want to throw in? If you’re not finding what you want, how else could you phrase it? A little bit of persistance and practice makes you much better at that.
Definitely look past page 2. Even if you won’t find exactly what you need, you might be inspired to add a new keyword.
Use the - to eliminate irrelevant hits. For example, last week I was searching for something (can’t remember what) that also happened to be the name of a fairly popular indepenedent band I’d never heard of. (I am a square, I guess.) Anyway, to get rid of the bad hits, I searched for
search terms -rock
Use " " to group terms that should appear right next to each other. For example, this morning I was looking for information on general relativistic time dilation, but I was getting too many pages about special relativity, so I changed my search from
general relativity time dilation
which was giving me hits on anything that had “general” anywhere on the page to
time dilation “general relativity”
which narrows the search to pages that really are primarily about general relativity.
I second what Podkayne said. Also, check out Google’s advanced search tips page. It’s got a lot of hints for how to narrow your search to more accurately reflect what you’re looking for.
Question: Why did you switch time dilation and general relativity around from your first example to the second one?
That minus symbol is a good tip, thanks.
I think I’ll look for that searching for dummies book at B & N next time I’m there.
It would help if we could do an example: Recently I was searching for mild sun exposure and it’s effect on hair growth (baldness). Where would you start first and what would be your search terms to weed out sales?
Is there any way to search just informative sites with Google (I doubt it)?
Weeding out sites that sell products or services can be a bit difficult. You might have a bit more luck in going the directory route and looking into the Health sub-sections, such as:
Health > Men’s Health > Baldness
or
Health > Conditions and Diseases > Skin Disorders > Hair Loss
This way, you may avoid sites that would instead be listed under:
Shopping > Health > Conditions and Diseases > Hair Loss
Unfortunately, many sites that sell hair loss products will contain some medical information so that they end up listed in as many directory headings as possible to increase their traffic (unless Google limits this, which I doubt).
As far as search terms, I would use something like:
sun exposure “hair loss” OR baldness
I also tried:
“hair loss” OR baldness sun exposure
The total results were the same, but they appeared in a slightly different order, so perhaps greater weight is given to terms that appears first? Another search term to consider would be :
+“MPB”
. . . since it appeared in many of the results. And in typing up this post I was able to learn that Aaron J. Kozol, R.Ph "know[s] of no research that shows sun exposure can worsen mpb . . . "
Learn something new every day.
I searched the health>Men’s health>baldness portion of the Google directory. I first used “Sun exposure” -MPB, (Because I don’t want to know about MPB but spontaneous hair loss instead). Nothing came up. So, I searched “sun exposure”. Nothing. So I searched “Sun”. I got multiple pages of things from computer, media, recreation, ect. categories. A whole bunch of newspaper and corporation web sites. Sun Microsystems came up about 30 times!!! Why didn’t the engine search only baldness like it said it would?
Also, no site at all about baldness popped up. This is the perfect example of what I am talking about. Sigh.
FYI, I made sure the the option for searching only baldness was selected.
If you can’t find something on Google, you can always try Google Groups. It’s an archive of Usenet discussions.
One “secret” that very few people seem to know about is the incredible wealth of information available on Usenet. I’ve been using them for years now and they are an incredible source of information. If you have a question, any question, odds are someone has asked the exact same question on Usenet. jmizzou linked to the Google Groups search above.
Some links for you to bookmark:
Okay info for basic search engines:Advanced Web Searching
Better info:Resources for research
Virtual Library
and… Holey Schmoley!! If you bookmark one tip site, make sure it’s Searchlore
(Maybe a bit too hackerish for some but still some good tips for the general public.)
Make sure you click on the “>>'s” next to the enter link. (Below the logo.)
Searchlore tips
Searchlore Main search engines
Searchlore bots (and how to make your own!)
hauss,
I’m a consumer health librarian and I teach people (public and professional) how to search the internet for health information. Here are my top tips and suggestions :
To find good search engines, look at a page like this :
Learn about advanced search options and use them to suit your needs and preferences. I’m using Google most of the time now.
In instances where you get 3 million results or if you’re searching a topic where you’re not sure in the links you find are reliable, forget search engines. Use specialized health info sites. If you have good luck with WebMD, Mayoclinic, etc, use them first. Since you’ve had trouble with these, I’d suggest these three instead :
This is the greatest thing in health info today : access to health topic pages, drug info, encyclopedias, and Pubmed (abstracts of medical literature w/some full text.)
Here’s their Exercise/Physical Fitness topic page :
If you start off at the organizations section, you can link to more info very quickly.
http://www.healthfinder.gov/
This is a search portal for government and nonprofit agency health information.
http://www.caphis.mlanet.org/consumer/index.html
A list of 100 high-quality Internet health sites.
Beyond that, it may help you to know that it’s not always easy to find good info on certain topics, even for those of us with too much education and really fast internet connections. You can always contact health libraries for more info, I know that other libraries, including mine, offer e-mail reference services. (There is a listing of libraries by location on MedlinePlus.)