After reading about Google Scholar in Research StrategiesĀ and then seeing it in action in class, I decided to give Google Scholar a shot. I find it ironic that a search engine that is known to provide Ā users with the most frequented sites regardless of relevancy or usefulness would create a separate search engine that actually does the exact opposite: provide me with websites that have the highest relevance to what I’m searching.
I guess Google isn’t one to give up any opportunity to stay on top of the search engine game, eh? Anyway, I tried Google Scholar and I was pretty surprised to find A LOT of results compared to the small results I got from using EBSCO. However, Google Scholar isn’t perfect, so I had to sift through some of the websites from the result list to find the ones that would help me in writing my research paper (and that’s even when I used the advanced settings to narrow down my results list!).
What I like about Google Scholar is that I get the option to sift through legal opinions and such and that’s a big help for me and my research topic.
When I used Google to do a regular search on my research topic, I got news websites at the top of my list and they were mostly reporting about my research topic in general, which is nice for background research but not very helpful as sources for my bibliography. And surprisingly, I have the same problem when it comes to using Google and Google Scholar: how to come up with the everyday search terms compared to the ones that the Library of Congress came up with, since my research topic has terms that were predetermined by Congress already.
