 Hello! My name is Kate and I'm a librarian at Kirkwood Community College. I'm going to show you how librarians use Google with purpose as an efficient and useful tool. Most of us use Google's search engine every day, probably several times a day. It's simple and easy to use, so what else is there to know? First, we will see how Google decides what results to return on your search. And second, we will look at specific techniques for gaining better control over that process. So, how does Google decide what results to return and in what order? When you enter a search, Google looks for web pages in its index that contain all the words you entered. It decides what order to show you those results based on, among other things, what pages are most popular. This comes in handy when we're looking for quick information but is much less helpful when we're doing research for school work. Google also considers the pages you have personally clicked on in your past searches. Basically, it tries to show you more of the same kind of sites that you've already looked at in the past. This can be a big problem when you want to find a variety of different viewpoints and a variety of different types of sources, which are both important goals to have when searching for resources for your research. The good news is that Google also provides tools that let you take control of these default search settings and be more specific about exactly what you're looking for. The first tool is the exact wording or phrase search, which is done with quotation marks. Quotation marks tell Google that you want it to search only and exactly what is within the quotes. So, if I put a single word in quotation marks, as shown in this example, Google will not also search for alternate spellings or for synonyms. And, if I put more than one word in quotation marks, Google will search those words as a phrase in that exact order. So, I might use quotation marks around a term that has more than one word, like climate change. Or, I might use it to find an article where I know the title or I know a specific line of text from it. This example shows how the phrase tool can be combined with other terms as well. In this case, to help me quickly identify the poem by Walt Whitman that contains this line. The second tool is the site limit or domain limit. This lets you tell Google exactly what domain or what type of domain you want the results to be from. For example, I can have Google search only the Kirkwood domain by limiting to sitekirkwood.edu. This search on the screen would search for the word calendar, but only on pages with Kirkwood.edu in the URL. Another way to use this site limit is to limit your search to a specific domain type. The domain type is indicated in the end of the domain name. It's the .com.edu.org or the many other domain types you might run across. So in this example, I can search for information about climate change published on a .gov site. You can see how we can use this knowledge about domains paired with the search technique to get very focused on what type of information we want Google to locate for us. If you haven't used this one before, you're going to find it really useful. There's another way to use the site limit, which can be very helpful. Instead of requiring results to be from a certain domain, you can exclude a certain domain. We use this most often to exclude .com sites from results. A good example of this is if you were to search for information on treatment of a certain condition in this example depression, Google would normally return many results from pharmaceutical companies by excluding .com sites with this reverse limit or exclusion limit minus site colon com. Now Google will show me everything except the commercial sites. If you want to learn about more Google search tools, see the library's website for a how to speak Google sheet that has the top 12 recommended Google search tools, as well as lots of other tips on how to search and evaluate websites. And remember that even though we can make Google a better tool, it shouldn't be your only tool for finding information. Make use of the library's books and ebook collections and subscription databases for high quality information.