Online Access to Knowledge Services: East and North Hertfordshire NHS Trust Knowledge and Library Services: Google and alternative search engines

How to Improve Your Search Results

Google is the most popular and ubiquitous search engine currently in use but it is not the only one.

Google and other search engines use 'operators'. Learning how to search using these operators will save you time and frustration.

However... here are a few things to bear in mind when searching Google:

Google only finds websites that are indexed by Google so your search may not be as thorough and the results may not be as comprehensive as you might wish.
Google's revenue comes from advertising. Unless you configure the settings on your Google account, it's algorithms (Google Video) will push information that it thinks you want based on your search history. This means that two people searching for exactly the same topic at the same time may pick up very different results. Check out this video from the University of York on Algorithms and check out our video on critical thinking and why it is important
The first few results that are displayed at the top of any list of search results may be advertisements.

On this page you will find:

How to Improve your search on Google
E-learning module on searching using Boolean Operators
Alternative Search Engines
Where to look for information that Google doesn't index (Deep Web)
Official statistics websites

For further information scroll down to the boxes below.

How to improve your search on Google with Google operators

Here are some of the most common Google operators that are in use at present. They do change so for an up to date list visit Google and/or YouTube and search for the phrase "Google Operators".

Google's Common Search Operators
Some of Google's most common search operators to help refine your search for quality not quantity.

E-learning Boolean Operators

E-learning Boolean Operators
Short e-learning tutorial on searching with Boolean Operators

Alternative Search Engines

BING
Bing is a search engine owned and operated by MicroSoft.
Duck Duck Go
Duck Duck Go is a search engine that emphasises that it protects the privacy of its searchers.
It does not track your searches.
Ecosia
Search engine that uses a percentage of its advertising revenue to plant trees.
StartPage
Claims to be 'the most private search engine'. It does not track your search history.
Wolfram Alpha
Wolfram Alpha is a search engine that 'computes answers and provides knowledge'. In other words if is very useful for finding facts and statistics e.g. population statistics, dates, key events etc

Official Statistics

Click on the links below to search various statistics sites and data repositories

Open Data published by UK central government, local authorities and public bodies
Office of National Statistics
Statistics for Scotland
Stats Wales
Data.gov.ie statistics for Ireland
Eurostat European statistics
OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
The Health Foundation Evidence Hub (Health Inequalities)
NHS Workforce Statistics

Drug Safety Monitoring and Reporting

Drug Safety Update (UK)
Drug safety updates from the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency.
EudraVigilance (EU)
"European database of suspected adverse drug reaction reports".
OpenVAERS (USA)
The OpenVAERS Project allows browsing and searching of the VAERS reports without the need to compose an advanced search (more advanced searches can be done at medalerts.org or vaers.hhs.gov).
VAERS - Vaccine Adverse Event ReportingSystem (USA)
"Established in 1990, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) is a national early warning system to detect possible safety problems in U.S.-licensed vaccines.".
VigiAccess (WHO)
VigiAccess provide public access to information in VigiBase, the WHO global database of reported potential side effects of medicinal products.
Yellow Card (UK) Reporting System
"The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) is the executive Agency of the Department of Health and Social Care that acts on behalf of the Ministers to protect and promote public health and patient safety, by ensuring that medicines and medical devices meet appropriate standards of safety, quality and efficacy".

Deep Web

The Deep Web contains about 90% of the information on the Internet, but is not accessible by Surface Web Crawlers, so you won't pick up information from the Deep Web with a Google search.

For more information about the Deep Web take a look at this article.

Try search engines below to delve deeper into the worldwide web.

BASE
Bielefeld academic search engine.
Carrotsearch
This search engine organises your search into topics.
Core
"The world's largest collection of open access research papers"
Dimensions
"All publications and citations together with rich contextual information – freely available for personal, non-commercial use"
Directory of Open Access Repositories
Search thousands of repositories.
Google Scholar
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature.
Mednar
"Mednar is a free, medically-focused deep web search engine"
MicroSoft Academic
Free search engine for academic literature.
Million Short
You can choose how many top ranking sites to remove from the results, to dig a bit deeper for information.
OSF Preprints
This is an aggregator of various preprint servers
Qwant
"Search engine that respects your privacy"
Researchgate
Use with caution and do not cite. If an article is on Researchgate, contact the author to see if they will provide you with a legal copy.
Science Open
Science Open is a discovery platform with interactive features for scholars to enhance their research in the open, make an impact, and receive credit for it
Semantic Scholar
Free, artificial intelligence powered research tool for scientific literature.
SSRN
Social Science Research Network
Unpaywall
Free scholarly articles
Wayback Machine
Web archive
Wolfram Alpha
"Computing answers and providing Knowledge" Statistical data and bite sized information on a variety of topics. Useful for the kids' homework as well.
WorldWideScience
Global science gateway.
Yandex (international Version)
"Yandex is a Russian multi-national corporation, specialising in Internet related products and services" - Wikipedia

Science.gov
Science.gov: your gateway to US Federal Science.
more...less...
Science.gov searches over 60 databases and over 2,200 scientific websites to provide users with access to more than 200 million pages of authoritative federal science information including research and development results.