Google’s Mission Statement.
Google is no doubt the world’s most popular internet search engine. Its mission statement is simple but powerful.
“Our company mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”
Although the front or landing page is just a clean page with just the keyword search box in which the user types in his/her keywords or phrases, what goes on behind scenes of the search box is astounding. Google seems to find every possible related information to the keyword or phrase in the shortest possible time and displays the results for the user to navigate through.
How Google Organizes Information
General Google Search and Results.
When we type in our key words or phrases into the search box and presses the Enter key on the keyboard, google searches the information and displays the results. Number of results and the respond time in seconds is shown at the top of the results page. Not only the that but also gives us the option to choose categories. They are images, videos, News, Books. The default is All. Most users do not utilize these options to really get to the correct information type and go with the default All option. Scrolling through the million results is time consuming and users get easily get lost because the information is just too much. Image below is an example of search for “Black Beans”. Rather than going by the default All results option, it’s good search practice to click on the required categories. For example, user wants images of black beans, then click on Images, wants a video, read a news post about black beans, then click on News. The results page responds according to the category being selected. This is good search practice to get much needed information in a short space of time.
YouTube for Video Contents.
Most websites have video contents that are linked contents in video sharing sites like Youtube, Vimeo and heaps of others .Website owners upload their videos on them and share them on their website with video links. The reason is that the website owners wants their visitors to stay on the website and watch their video contents than the directing them to the video hosting provider (Youtube or Vimeo). Also, some websites have video content which visitors can watch direct.
Therefore, google has the Videos categories under a general search result page. For users who are searching for video content only then Youtube is the video content depository owned by Google. The search box is right at the top in YouTube opening page and it works just like normal google search. The only different is YouTube is for video contents and not text. Google pays YouTube content contributors and that’s why there is so much quality content videos now available on Youtube.
Google Scholar for Scholarly Articles and Content.
One thing missing though from the category list is Scholarly articles. The reason seems obvious. Search for scholarly articles are targets of researchers, students, academics and knowledge workers. At the same time, scholarly articles like journal publications, reports, and etc are held by knowledge repository database companies who pay authors and content creators like the different subject specific journals, hold them in their computer servers and then sell to tertiary institution libraries, organizations and individuals to access them. Some notable examples include https://www.proquest.com/, www.ebsco.com, PubMed, ScienceDirect.com. Some are free while others are paid services. Universities, organizations, and researchers subscribe to these services to access well researched articles, scientific experiment results, reports and etc. When institutions subscribe to these services and students, academics and their staff can access these online library services free from within their university or library computer network.
Google has organized scholarly information to be accessed through https://scholar.google.com/. It’s slogan is “Stand on the shoulder of giants”.
The results page of Google Scholar search allows users to filter the search by time range (in years) and relevance.
One very important feature of Google Scholar search is that it allows users to download the Reference File which can easily be loaded into reference management software like EndNote, RefWorks,RefMan and BibTex. Reference file can be easily downloaded clicking on citation button. Below is a sample Google Scholar search result for “Bank of PNG”.
2017 PNG Economic Survey document is available on Researchgate.Net website. It was cited or referenced 6 times by others, and referencing file can be downloaded by clicking on the citation icon (”). The same document may exist in other websites but they might not contain the downloadable citation file.
EndNote Referencing Software
For students or individuals involved in doing research related work, recommended to invest in a good referencing or citation management software. One good one worth looking at is EndNote.
Its bit expensive (AUS$375) and but its worth as it makes referencing/citation management easier and integrated straight into Microsoft Office Applications like Word and PowerPoint to make automated references list in documents. Below are the websites to buy EndNote and self-training videos and other resources. If EndNote citation file is downloaded from Google Scholar, it can be automatically load into Endnote by just double clicking the downloaded file.