Is Google search 'good' search?

I have written about Google recently ( here ), but this time I want to consider search in particular. Apparently around 80% of search is Goo...

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What are scholarly materials?

So what are scholarly, academic or peer-reviewed literature or materials? Well, scholarly, academic and peer-reviewed mean roughly the sam...

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Is Google still 'good'?

It was back in 1998 or 1999 that I began using Google search. I loved the pared back look of the Google search page (if you were around the...

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A few interesting nuggets

In researching material for recent post ( here ) I found a few interesting nuggets (side-projects, if you will). The first tip I heard was a...

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Search and AI brain rot

A recent post was about some research on the lack of brain activity when using AI tools ( here ; Kosmyna et al., 2025; McBain, 2025). What I...

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AI does rot the brain

While I have written about AI before ( here ), there is research showing that regular use of LLM apps - such as Claude.ai and ChatGPT - appe...

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Searching difficult sites

There are a few websites I use regularly which have poor search functions; or hardly any search function at all. Sometimes the search on tho...

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Explaining article search to newbies

Each semester I will get a few students who have had very little experience in finding journal articles. I usually begin by explaining how t...

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Site search without a search box

Have you ever wanted to search a site but cannot find a search function to do so on the site itself? I have run into that situation a few ti...

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Searching bookmarks in Chrome

If we want to watch documentaries online, there are several sites which keep lists of freely available episodes and documentary films. Howev...

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Searching within bookmarks

I had an interesting problem recently, where I knew I had a site bookmarked, but was unable to find it amongst my bookmarks. A manual scan t...

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Blogger keyword search made simple

I discovered by accident today how I can limit a Blogger blog search to just the keywords. It has taken me a number of years to sort this ...

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What is scholarly literature?

Scholarly literature is material that has been peer reviewed, and includes materials such as journals, text books, conference proceedings ...

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Searching for people on LinkedIn

If you are like me and want to search for fellow travellers within groups you are a member of on LinkedIn, then you will have found that L...

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Searching for a Pan-Database Database

I tend to start searching for research materials using GoogleScholar: because it is easy. Using some Boolean search tools: +, "-...

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Gathering Research Resources

I have always interacted with my lecturers and colleagues a lot, building good relationships where I can ask my thousand questions of a ra...

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Newsletter Issue 236, June 2013

Sam Young Newsletter Issue 236, June 2013 Hi guys, Wow - what a question to ask! Do the genders tell lies d...

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