Skip to Main Content
PierceLibraryLogo

Evaluating Information on the Internet

Learn how to evaluate whether a website and its contents are reliable and discover tools and tricks to get better results from your online searches.

Keywords

Keywords are words or phrases that best describe the information you want. They are the most essential parts of the question!

Keywords are used for search engines on both the subscription electronic resources at Pierce and on the web.

magnetic poetry by surrealmuse

Pick the most basic words that define your topic. In general, don't type normal sentences in search engines; just use the keywords.

Example:

What are the causes of diabetes in children?

diabetes AND children AND causes

Other Techniques

Wait, there's more! Try the following techniques to make your searches even better.

Phrase Searches

Often keywords are more than one word. Most search engines let you put quotation marks around these so only results with the exact phrase are listed.

"rap music"

"cell phone"

Truncation

Shortening a keyword to its basic root and adding a special character (usually an asterisk "*" or "?") at the end will tell the computer to search for variations on the word.

Searching for politic* will find:

POLITICS, POLITICAL, POLITICIAN

Note: Check the search engine help screens to see if this can be done.  It's most common on subscription databases.

Parentheses

Combines concepts and techniques. The search engine will search for what's grouped or nested inside the parentheses first.

("rap music" OR "hip hop") AND censorship

Boolean Operators 101

Want to learn even more about Boolean searching? Check out this video from Pam Posz at Sacramento City College:

More about Boolean Operators

You can combine keywords using AND, OR, NOT:

AND gets more specific results because all the words must be on a web page. Some search engines (like Google) automatically insert AND between words, but it doesn't hurt for you to put it there.

"climate change" AND cars

OR allows you to search for synonyms or word variations in one search. Often there are other words that mean the same as your keyword. OR searchers for these variations at the same time.

"climate change" AND (cars OR vehicles OR automobiles)

NOT eliminates unwanted words. This prevents useless sites from showing in your searches.

"climate change" AND cars NOT hybrids