The Google Library / Google For Dummies

The Google Library

Google is not a replacement for dedicated online research facilities such as ProQuest and eLibrary. But the range and depth of academic material you can find through Google is truly amazing. Two operators help narrow searches to academic realms and certain types of result:

filetype: The filetype operator can isolate the PDF format, which is commonly used to post academic papers.
site: The site operator narrows search results to a particular site (such as a university) or an entire top-level domain. In this tip I'm focusing on the .edu domain.

Combining these two operators yields fantastic and fascinating results. Whatever your interests, you can give your searching an academic slant by forming search requests for academic PDF files. A few examples:

filetype:pdf site:.edu 'black holes'
filetype:pdf site:.edu rebuilding iraq
filetype:pdf site:.edu movie stars

Remember

This type of searching narrows results considerably. To broaden the search, you can always remove one of the two operators - try that if you get no results at all. To narrow a search even further, try putting a specific college URL after the site operator. You can also use Google's university search, as described in Chapter 6.

I suggest narrowing to the .edu domain as a natural method of targeting academic papers. But leaving that operator out of the picture brings in interesting white papers and business documents posted to dot-com addresses. And narrowing to government sites with the site:.gov operator gives great results too, for political, social, governmental, and military topics.

Tip

You don't need to have Adobe Acrobat Reader to see PDF files through Google. That reader keeps the PDF formatting intact, and it's a free download. But PDF files do take longer to load than HTML files, and Google handily converts all PDF documents to HTML documents on demand - just click the View as HTML link in any PDF search result.