When doing legal research, Google is probably not the place you want to start. Because anyone can publish anything on the internet, there is a lot of information to sift through when searching the web and you can also end up with a lot of irrelevant and/or unreliable information.
Google can be good place to search when you're looking for background information and additional resources outside of scholarly publications. These resources, often referred to as grey literature, can include information about government departments, consumer issues, companies, statistics, latest news and more. Google is also a place to search when you want to find a specific resource that isn't showing up in the Library's collection.
There are some tips and tricks you can implement to make the most out of Google Search and improve the relevance and quality of your results. These strategies are slightly different to those offered in Primo Search and journal databases.
While Google Search does offer an Advanced Search, which you might like to use, you can use these strategies within the basic search box to provide you with the same control.
You can use these strategies to search effectively in Google and Google Scholar.
| Search for an exact phrase, or match |
Put your search terms in quotation marks "climate change" |
| Exclude a word from your search |
Put a dash - before any word you want to exclude Port corrosion -phone |
| Include both terms in your results |
Put a + before any word that you want to include "data mining" +intelligence |
| Search within a range of numbers |
Use two periods .. between the numbers to return results within that range sea temperature 2012..2017 |
| Search within a website (Google only) |
Use site: to search within a particular web address or to limit your results to a domain type site: abs.gov.au site:.edu |
| Limit by geographical area or time frame (Google only) | Use the Google Tools drop down options to limit to Australian results and/or select a time frame for your results. |
