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Diego Rivera and his San Francisco Murals

Online Search Tips

magnifying glass iconRather than putting a full sentence into an online search box, it can be more productive to focus your topic down into a few search words. To combine them, follow these search tips:

  • use quotes around two more more words that MUST stay together
  • use AND between words that MUST show up in your search
  • use OR between synonyms (you don't care which word shows up, but one MUST)
  • search string: the way you combine all your search words with ORs and ANDs and quotes

icon from Google

Assistance

line drawing of envelopeEmail reference is available Monday through Friday during the Fall and Spring semesters. We try to respond within two days.

 

drawing of a laptopChat with the library 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to meet with a librarian for in-depth help with your research.

Web Sources

Description

  • Websites are online spaces that host a multitude of content. The collection of content for a website is within the same domain. (In the example below, sfdph.gov is the domain).
    • Examples:

What do they contain?

How often are these sources published?

  • Continuously

Found on:

  • The "open web." Search engines "crawl" and "index" items found in the open web, such as webpages, blog posts, infographics, PDFs, and other material that people post to the web. The open web contains materials not behind a paywall (such as when an online journal website asks for payment to show you an article). Databases are technically behind a paywall, because they contain material that is accessed after the library pays a subscription fee.

Getting Started

Money icon from FreekpikIn general, we recommend searching CCSF Library resources first, because they contain material that is not freely available on the open web. However, there is lots material on the open web that is not in the library! Therefore, combining these efforts (searching library resources, and then searching the open web) can be effective.

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Constructing a Web Search

Searching for information on the web efficiently requires developing a search strategy. Take your topic and think how you will turn it into search terms. While you can certainly search the web by entering a question, a stronger search strategy would be to choose the most impactful words of your question, and shape it in a way that the search engine understands.

If your research question is "What is the best solution to homelessness in the Bay Area?" the most essential elements to find are solution, homelessness, and the Bay Area. It can help to brainstorm alternatives to the words IN your research question, because different words will surface different results in your search.

Search Word Chart Brainstorm

Keyword
(derived from the question)

solution homelessness Bay Area
Synonyms

ideas

proposals

legislation

program

homeless

unhoused

housing precarity

unsheltered

San Francisco

Oakland

East Bay

California (broader to see statewide analysis)

 

Note: the quotation marks around some search terms help tell the search engine that you want results with the words stuck together exactly as you have them.

Combining three of my search concepts, a sample Google search is shown below.

A sample Google search string: Unhoused and Program and "San Francisco"

Recommended Web Resources for Diego Rivera

Use these websites from trustworthy nonpartisan organizations and academic departments to flesh out and augment the research you conduct using Library resources.


Library & Learning Resources, City College of San Francisco
50 Frida Kahlo Way, San Francisco, CA 94112 | 415-452-5541
https://library.ccsf.edu/diego/web
library.ccsf.edu
CC-MAIN-2023-23
43102
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:B6G6QXB2UM5DP745JA4IARBLN6L5YLGS
<urn:uuid:37be00d0-109a-4657-b342-34eb2f258e07>
2023-05-29T01:41:43Z
54.85.246.96
text/html
sha1:ENFRN65OUOBTO6SABCBRWM3NLAYGFSZ5
<urn:uuid:ac03d812-1479-4499-a99e-1774c3a91568>
https://library.ccsf.edu/diego/web
response
<urn:uuid:df2f1bfb-e009-4379-bcb9-ee6b0246f128>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2023-23
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for May/June 2023
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-36
software: Apache Nutch 1.19 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.4-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/