Study Guide

Research on the Internet

How to use Search Engines

A couple of recent posts in the Middle Ages conference prompts me to say a few more words about doing Internet searching for historical information. What follows applies specifically to Google, but other search engines have analogous features and the basic principles are the same.

I'll begin with the specific examples that sent me off searching. The first was Grace O'Malley, on the Pirates thread. I'm instinctively skeptical of "colorful" characters and especially of ones that involve gender role-reversal. Why? Because they play into modern prejudices a little too neatly. Doesn't mean I reject them out of hand; it just means I'm skeptical. Nobody makes up colorful stories about techniques for smelting copper or the diplomatic relations between Siena and Arezzo, but they might exaggerate stories about female pirates. See what I mean?

So, given that I was skeptical, what to do? Before the Internet it was really quite a puzzle and one I probably wouldn't have been able to pursue given the rather paltry holdings of our library. But now we have Google!

So, first off, I just plug the name in: "Grace O'Malley". Note the quotes. If I don't use the quotes, I get all sorts of references to "grace" or to "o'malley".

This yields a number of hits. I took a look at one, but it was a sort of tourist travel essay. It did have pictures of a specific place, so very likely there was at least a legend associated with the place. But I'm still skeptical. I *could* just keep grinding through the several thousand sites, but there's a better way.

I clicked on "Advanced Search". Hoy! A zillion options. The one I'm after, though, is the seventh option: Domain. I want to know what the scholarly community has to say about Gracie. So, over in the Domain field I typed: .edu

That's ".edu" without the quotes. This says: only return hits that are at domains that end in ".edu" -- which is to say, only universities. This is still no guarantee of reliability, but at least it filters out the tourist sites.

After visiting a few of these, I was able to find some specific citations of sources. There. That's what I was looking for--some evidence that the scholarly community has actually looked into this subject. The information on the pages said much the same as the tourist site, so I consider that a confirmation.

IOW, Gracie's okay by me.

Now, the second topic that spurred these comments was a question about illuminated manuscripts. I had a vague recollection that there were some good resources on this subject; not just pictures of manuscripts, but something about how and why they were made. Once again I scoped the search to ".edu" because I didn't want to get a bunch of SCA sites. The SCA folks are very nice and very fun and *can* be very knowledgeable, but the level of knowledge is extremely uneven. Better to start with the academic sites and then widen the search from there, if one is so inclined.

The phrase "illuminated manuscripts" (quotes included) still returned an awful lot of hits, and the question was specifically about the methods used. Fine. I changed the search string to be: "illuminated manuscripts" method site:.edu and that narrowed things down considerably. It took only a couple of minutes to find the Utah site.

Well, there you go. I feel it's very important for us teachers to teach you students about how to use the Internet not for searching in general, but specifically for doing serious research. This means learning how to be critical of what you read, how to judge sites, and how to construct effective searches. I hope this little essay is of some help in that regard.