Using Google to write your essay

The power of Google

Unless you’re writing an essay on a really obscure topic, odds are that someone else has already done some research on the subject. And odds are that some of this information will have found its way into Google. Instead of starting from scratch to build up a bibliography, why not use the Internet search engines to help you?

• Go to Google website (or other search engine, but Google is by far the most effective)
• Enter the topic you’re looking for
• Enter a word or two to help pick up on resources which might be mentioned in someone’s bibliography (annals of, research, journal of, study)
• Click search
• View resulting list of websites, each containing list of useful references

Say you’ve got to write an essay on the impacts of tourism on an area. You’ve found some books and articles yourself, but you’d like to include more academic research from journals, if you could find them.

I know from my research that there is a journal called “Annals of tourism research” and another called “Journal of travel research”, so in the Google search box I enter:

‘Of’ will probably be discounted by the search engine for being a common word, but this search will still find me any pages with the words ‘impact’, ‘tourism’ and ‘annals’ in it. You always have a posibbility to cheat by using essay help australia once. On the first page of results which follows, all ten results contain long lists of resources on the impact of tourism from other people’s research references. All I need to do now is go through the various lists and pick out useful-looking articles, which I can now search for on the university library catalogue. Easy!

TOP TIP
On a Google results page, use the ‘Cached’ link to access a particular result. This will bring up the desired page with your search terms highlighted, making it much easier for you to find the relevant section.

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