During my studies I happened to use Google a lot. I learned a lot from it but also a lot – or even more – about it. One thing I learned quite fast: Google is NOT the internet!
Now that I am working as a teacher as well as internet marketing freelancer I see a lot of similarities between my students and clients. Many of them think “if it is not on the first page of Google, it does not exist”. While this sentence is one of the key arguments for internet marketers and other look-a-likes (wait…! ;-) ) it is pretty damn wrong for empirical or even basic college research.
While you are telling potential customers that “nobody will look further than on the first page of google in order to find products” it is quite different with research approaches. When it comes to research I do not want my students or co-workers to only take a quick look at the number one page of Google. That’s what I could have done myself during lunch break. Research is more than just scrolling down the first 10 – 20 search engine results. It goes deeper.
And that also means that research is not only using the basic search on www.google.com. When you want to research a certain topic you should use different search types. Google is obviously a good place to start and you do not even have to leave it in order to find more search possibilities. Google itself offers goodies like the blog search, social search, picture search, video search or scholar for scientific research (research stored papers and publications). Nevertheless it is not the worst of all ideas to add some more search power to your Google search. One extra search you could consider is searching pictures with Bing.com. While the “normal” search with bing might contain quite similar results (nevertheless you should try it anyway) like Google, the picture search shows usually many different results.
Besides the “normal” search engines there are way to many other possibilities to search for stuff. Think of everything you use online. Facebook, Twitter, Quora…….everything is a place to search and dig deeper. Not only the first 5 results are “good” or “valid”. Very often you have to dig very deep to find satisfactory. So please do not only use 5 minutes for your search (like we usually do when looking for some new products to buy) – a web search is work and therefore needs a decent amount of time.
Do not be satisfied with the second best….
While searching for the “right” or “good” results many students get lazy and frustrated when it takes a longer time so they tend to say “oh well yeah…that’s good enough”. Believe me: As soon as you think “well yeah…that might be good enough” – it is not! There is no “good enough” in (academic) research. As mentioned above research is as much work as everything else. It might be boring and long lasting but it is the foundation of your outcome. So do not hurry and please do not be satisfied with the second best. It’s just not good enough….
Always think of Mulder and Scully: the truth is somewhere out there….and even if it takes some time to find it, thanks to the internet is still is way easier than it was several years ago. Honestly…what do you prefer? Doing research online or crawling around old libraries in order to find information……yeah, thought so! So get up, get on, get it done!
