Smart Search

Are you wasting too much time searching online? Are you tired of sifting through second graders’ reports, fanatics’ ramblings, and advertisements in search of reliable information?  

Try This:

•  Go to  Como Sr's Research Resources  or 
•  Type elm4you.org in the address bar. These are all reliable sources. They include links for newspaper, journal and magazine articles, as well as reference books and encyclopedias.

Google Searching Tips:

• Tired of raw Google searches not giving you the information you really want? Check out these TIPS for smart searching on Google.
• Search Google's Advanced Search page

* If you find the following domains in an internet address, the site is probably reliable: 

• .edu (US higher ed)
• .sch (school - used outside of US)
• .k12 (most US school sites)
• .gov (US government (add country code for outside US)
• .ac (higher ed outside of US, usually with country code, example: .ac.uk   
• .mil (US military)

        NOTE:  

* The following may indicate you're on a personal website:

    ~ (tilde sign)
    % (percent sign)
    the word "user" or a personal name "jdoe" is in the address after the domain name and the first forward slash "/"

* If you’re not having luck in databases, try scholar.google.com designed for academic searching.

* If you can't find the owner or publisher of a website, go to easywhois.com and enter the URL of the site you would like to research.

* If you want current news articles, only minutes or hours old, go to Google's news.google.com.  For older news articles, go to the databases listed under "Newspapers and Magazines" or "Combination of Books, Newspapers and Magazines" on Como's "Research Resources" webpage.  Other websites for finding articles are magportal.com and findarticles.com.

*Branch away from Google and try using other search engines such as sweetsearch.com