Online Search Tips

​The Internet is a great way to get current information on almost any topic, but how do you sort through all the information and find a reliable source?  Here are a few tips to limit your searches that will do the sorting for you.  This example gives you the results using the various methods in Google for “green bean rust”. 
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Typing in green bean rust into a search engine resulted in about 1,120,000,000 results!  I did this same experiment in 2012 with 8.5 million results, which is an indication of how much the Internet has exploded in just a decade.   In trying to narrow it down – here are the results:

• green bean rust university extension:  13,800,000 results from university extension sites from around the country
  
  
• green bean rust Wisconsin:  6,900,000 results from both commercial and university sites
  
  
• “green bean rust”:  74,100 results, by putting quotes around the words the results include both commercial and academic sites with exactly those words in the site including opinions and blogs of many gardeners. 
  
  
• green bean rust Wisconsin site:edu:  31,600 results, by including site:edu those results are limited to all sites that are educational, sites with a domain name of .com are excluded.  If you wanted to limit your search to only commercial products, you could do that by including site:com in your search. 
  
  
• green bean rust site:wisc.edu:  20 results from Wisconsin extension sites only.  This can work for any website doman that you might want to search.  

​The Master Gardener program highly recommends obtaining your information from reliable sources.  Preferred sources include academic institutions, government agencies, botanical gardens, and non-profit organizations. 

Tip from the Master Gardener Program
While it is better to use a preferred source for information, other sources often come up first when looking things up online. Don’t stop there! Use this as the first step in the process of finding information and searching for more preferred sources. You may learn terms or concepts that you can then apply in a new search with keywords that also use the word “university” or “.edu” to help bring up university sources of information.