How to Research Pt. 1 - Google-Fu
Alright. I have decided to make a little tutorial in how to use different ways to access information, especially scientific information. The reason for this is, that... Well, research has found that a lot of Gen Z and especially Gen Alpha struggle with doing online research, mostly due to being so used to use the internet via Apps. And having had to do a research project at university, where my fellow students massively struggled to find anything on the requested topic.
So... Let me start with the most obvious topic: Google.
Funnily enough I gotta say, that even a lot of my fellow Millenials struggle with google. Mind you, Google has become a lot less user-friendly over the years. Ten years ago it was a lot easier to google stuff, because Google pushed less advertisement.
It should be said, that these techniques also work with most non-google search engines. So, let me go through it.
How to Google
For reasons the question I will use to demonstrate this entire thing will be: "How many biological sexes are there?" Just because I had to show research on this in online discussions too often. (Me, that is, as an intersex individuum.)
The most intuitive way would probably be to directly ask google.
Now, on the first glance the results of this search do not look that bad.
Again, I am intersex. I am definitely not a male or female based on my biology. And obviously, as such I have read quite a bit on the topic before.
Now. One of the things you need to do, when doing research, is to be able to judge a source.
Scientific American is somewhat reliable as a starting point, but it is popscience, hence you should definitely not cite it if there is any other way.
The NIH is usually a reliable source. But, if you just look into the preview text (or read the abstract on the side) you will find, that the scientist completely just mixes through sex, gender and sexuality. Which... might not make for the best source.
The next one - from the Arizona State University - also is a bit too much on the gender part, and too little on the sex part. And if you look at the preview, you will also find something else there: Google has marked "gender" as an "exact result" by using bold fonts.
And lastly we have a result that is the private blog of some economics guy. Which... might not be a good source for this.
And if you scroll just a bit further down, you will find openly trans- and interphobic sites like Women UK and Emma.
This is the point where you should realize two things:
Maybe we should change the search
You really gotta be careful with what pages get brought up, when you use your google-fu.
See, here is the thing. Why in the nine hells is the 4th (!!!) result of the search some private blog of some dude? I can tell you: Google is basing the results partly on the SEO of the pages. And it just turns out that some economics blokes are actually really good at SEO stuff. That is search engine optimization.
Other than that, Google also basing stuff on traffic and how many people clicked at what link and probably some other stuff that us normal mortals will never understand.
So, how can you change the results? Well, you use the tools that google gives you.
Using " around a group of words or a single word tells google, that you want this exact group of words in the result and no variation of it.
Using - in front of a word or a group of words marked with " before means that you want to exclude these results.
And using * somewhere means, that a word can end differently and you will still accept it.
So, what have we learned from the other results before? Well, for one: We should definitely tell google, that we want to know about biological sex, not about gender. So we should probably mark "biologial sex" as an exact group. It probably would help also to include something like "intersex" because that way we give google something to go off on. Lastly: A lot of supposedly "feminist" sites will actually push their TERFy agenda. So, to exclude them, I will tag this search also as -"women's rights". And because I am not interested in someone's blog, I will also use -blog.
Hence we get the search term:
And look at the results I am getting:
Now, this might not be perfect - but it is much more like what I was looking for, right?
So, that is a quick primer on how to google-fu.
Tomorrow I am gonna talk a bit about Wikipedia.
