For the internet, Google appears to be the search engine king. Here are some tips to optimize your searches:
Let’s assume our topic is the French Revolution
Simply entering in French Revolution into Google gets you 67,300,000 hits. Not fun to search through.
Adding more words to the search will help refine your entry.
Searching for French Revolution History yields 48,100,000 hits. That’s still a bunch, but it is better than the previous search
Using quotations to search for a specific phrase will help your search
Searching for “French Revolution” History yields 11,600,000 hits. Much less than before
Okay, well Google is great, but there will still be a number of hits that don’t match what you are looking for. Most of these you can add more words to your search to refine your search. However, if you have a large number of hits that don’t match what you’re looking for, but those hits have a trend, eliminating key terms from your search will work well for you.
Let’s assume we were looking for information on Vikings. Most of your hits will be concerned with the Minnesota Vikings, the football team, NOT the
European Vikings. So to eliminate a word or topic from your search, you would search for:
Vikings –Minnesota
Non-internet searches
Use your library. The OCC library has resources to aid you in researching a topic. Public Libraries can also be very helpful when looking for books about a topic. You can search through what books Orange County public libraries have on their website: http://www.ocpl.org/
Looking for a journal article?
Try google scholar: http://scholar.google.com/
You may need to be on campus to be able to access various journals. If you can’t access the journals you need, try the libraries at UCI. These are open to nonstudents. You won’t be able to check out books, but you can access all of the journals they have access to.