1. HOW DO I RESEARCH? WITH GOOGLE OR A DATABASE

2. Database Professionally published information Identifiable authority Easy to search Quick access to reliable information Google Lots of personally generated content Questionable authority Difficult to focus search May take a long time to focus search DATABASE VERSUS GOOGLE……..

3. GOOGLE Offers the most popular search engine Has many different applications A extremely successful advertising company Uses data mining and targeted advertising based on user habits

4. GOOGLE SEARCH RESULTS…… Results are listed in order of “Google authority” which are affected by: Profitability for Google (Companies pay to have their link appear at or near the top of searches) Page content (How close is the link to what you are searching for)

5. GOOGLE :WHAT IS GOOD FOR? Google is good for quickly finding noncontroversial, authoritative sites (Examples: movie trailers, weather, how to spell a word) Google bad for quickly finding factual information on research and controversial topics (Examples: Global Warming, Endangered Species) Skewed results because Google owned sites and businesses can pay to have their links appear at the top of your search

6. POLAR BEARS AND GLOBAL WARMING Google search provides: The first three links are paid advertisers There are 2,150,000 results using Polar Bears and Global Warming as search parameters Dozens of advertisements down the right side of each result page You will need to spend many hours looking through the links to determine which ones provide quality information!!

7. THINK ABOUT IT! Do you want to spend hour after hour searching for accurate information or taking your information from a site that provides information that you can not verify?

8. ONLINE DATABASES Try one of Chesterfield County Public Schools Online Databases next time you want to do research.

9. HOW TO GET TO OUR DATABASES *

10. DATABASES AVAILABLE TO ELEMENTARY STUDENTS *

11. ONLINE DATABASES Available 24/7 May log in at home using your student number as username and last four digits of student number for password Fast, accurate, simple to use