do you find it funny that we'd give these tips in the age of ai-assisted search?
avoid questions or full sentences
site: can limit your searches to a single domain or even a single webpage (.gov, .edu, .org, centenary.edu)
~term will find similar search terms (i.e., ~college will also find "university")
*term will retrieve variations on your search term (i.e. "wren" will find "razor-tailed wren")
"actual phrases can be searched" like that
.. can limit your results to a date range (2015..2019)
related: finds similar websites
| will find one or more of the terms it separates (e.g. blouse|shirt|chemise)
Some things are easily "google-able" with success. Discrete bits of information are easier to find than complex answers:
Question: What's the capitol of Libya?
A google search to find this info probably won't take you very long, or require very much effort. Maybe you'd be likely to type in the whole question. Boo. Maybe you'd simply type something like this: libya capitol. Are there other ways? Maybe. But the point is that doing a precise keyword-based search for a discrete thing is not all that is involved in research.
How would you go about putting together Google searches for more complex ideas? Let's say we have a big, hard-to-answer question:
Does fatty liver disease always progress to cirrhosis?
You might be tempted to google that question, and you might get any number of answers. First, though, try breaking up the big question into its main "idea" or "conceptual" components. Perhaps you'd agree that these are the main "parts":
"fatty liver" OR hepatomegaly
cirrhosis
progression OR prognosis
Moving from natural language to conceptual "chunks" makes your queries more manageable, and will improve your results. More than that, this also enables you to frame your research queries - because you'll be deploying such queries, or strings of search commands, in google and in our Library's research database environment in the same ways.
OMNIA searches content pulled from databases that we subscribe to. By and large, this includes traditionally-published materials (articles, books, chapters, reports, etc.). some of this is available on the open web, but much of it is protected by PAYWALLs or PASSWORDS.
GOOGLE primarily but not exclusively indexes web objects. Many of these are websites, but this changes.
You should search for known citations in Google Scholar. Searching in Omnia is frequently better when you are working with topics at the vocabulary- and methodology-building stage, i.e., when you are still getting your head around your research question and the themes are still somewhat fluid.
OMNIA is also likely to lead you to a wider variety of source types.
OMNIA does not do a good job on its own of tracking citations. GOOGLE SCHOLAR is much better at this.
To discover and hone topics and research questions: OMNIA.
To locate known citations and trace citations of specific works: Google Scholar.