Google Products in More Detail

On this page

• Which Google
• What is included in Google?
• How are Results Ranked?
• How up to date is Google?
• Searching Google
• Google Alerts
• Google Scholar

Which Google?

Google is a single search engine, but it has multiple portals. Different portals offer advantages in different situations. For instance:

Country-specific Google

www.google.com is the standard Google homepage. However, there are other, country-specific, homepages which prioritise sites from those countries and allow you to easily limit results to those from the selected country, e.g. www.google.co.uk

Google Scholar

Google Scholar returns only results which the algorithms regard as ‘academic’. See later for more information, as this is very useful in MI.

Google Books

This is a search engine for the full text of printed books; how much content is displayed depends on arrangements with the copyright holder: for some books, only a small number of pages are available but for others, it is the whole book.

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What is included in Google?

Google covers all web data crawled and retrieved by Google’s Googlebot.

Google is one of the most-used search engine. However, no search engine searches the whole of the web. If it is important for you to find all results, or you get nothing on Google but think that there ought to be a result (or more results), then repeat your search on another search engine.

Alternatively, use a metasearch engine, which searches multiple search engines simultaneously.

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How are Results Ranked?

By default, Google search results are ranked with the results Google feels are most relevant first.

The algorithm by which results are sorted is proprietary, so nobody outside Google knows exactly how it works. However, we do know that it uses a combination of factors, including but not limited to:

• Secured site (https, not http)
• Mobile-friendly
• Speed of loading
• Content quality
• Content length
• Quality backlinks (links to the page from other good websites)
• Domain age
• Traffic

So a website with a large amount of high-quality content on a website that has been around for a number of years, is accessed frequently and is linked to from other quality websites is likely to rank high.

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How up to date is Google?

Googlebot crawls websites ‘regularly’ and updates its record of the content. Depending on the nature of the site, updates could occur at any time between days or weeks. The larger and more active a site is, the more likely that it will be updated quickly.

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Searching Google

Word Choice

Google simply crawls fulltext; it does not work on assigned keywords. Therefore, think like the author: what words do you think they would have used in the sort of document you are looking for?

Google uses both stemming and synonyms.

‘Stemming’ is where the word stem is used for the search, so if you search ‘teen’ you will get results for teen, teenager, teenagers, etc. This happens automatically.

Synonyms are more complex; Google’s algorithm looks at your search term and will automatically include results with words it thinks are synonyms. So a search for ‘picture’ is likely to also include results for ‘graphics’ or ‘photographs’. The algorithm is quite good at only picking relevant synonyms, but not 100% effective.

Therefore:

• If you want to search for an exact word, and ‘turn off’ stemming and synonyms, put the word in double quotation marks: “picture”.
• If you want to be sure that a particular synonym is included, use OR: picture OR photograph.

Refining Your Search with Operators

Combining Searches

You can also combine searches using the operators above. For instance:

• “pharmacy technician” OR pharmacist site:ukmi.org.uk will search for pages that include the phrase “pharmacy technician” or the word “pharmacist” but only on the www.ukmi.org.uk website.
• “pharmacy technician” OR pharmacist site:nhs.uk filetype:pdf will search for PDF documents containing the phrase “pharmacy technician” or the word “pharmacist” hosted on any site with the .nhs.uk domain name.

Notes:

• Although you can combine search operators to produce complex searches, Google has a limit of 32 words for a search.
• Google does not recognise brackets in searches.

Natural Language vs. Search Strings

Google understands natural language questions. So you can do either of the following:

• Maximum dose flucloxacillin
• What is the maximum dose of flucloxacillin?

AI Overview

Google results are preceeded by an AI overview, which has the potential to give erroneous content (see UKMi Position Statement on the Use of AI in MI Services). This feature can be removed from a search by adding '-AI' after the search term.

Additional functions

By default, Google shows all its results. However, you can choose to see only:

• Results from news sites
• Images (can be useful for tablet identification)
• Videos
• Maps
• The ‘more’ button allows you to select ‘Books’ for results from Google Books.

Tools

On the results page, under the main search box, there is a link for ‘tools’.

• If you use www.google.co.uk rather than www.google.com, this allows you the option to limit your results to UK results only.
• ‘All results’ can be changed to ‘verbatim’. Verbatim means that Google will only search for the terms you input; it removes personalised, corrected, suggested, related and noninclusive results.
• ‘Any time’ can be changed to filter results between dates you choose.

Cached Pages

A ‘cached’ page is a temporary copy of a webpage. It can be stored either on the client computer (yours) or elsewhere (e.g. at Google). Cached pages are stored to reduce lag time.

• On your computer/in your browser, if you press the ‘browser back’ button, the browser may show the cached page rather than displaying the page ‘new’. This is more efficient as it does not require the browser to go back to the website and display new information.
• Elsewhere, cached pages allow pages to be displayed quickly at times of high workload, or if the website is down.

If you want to make sure that you are not seeing a cached page, ‘refresh’ the page.

Google Advanced Search

If you find it difficult to remember the operators, or you are trying to construct as complex a search as Google allows, you may wish to use the Google Advanced Search page. This gives you boxes to fill in for all the operators listed in the table above, depending on which you wish to use, plus the option to search for number ranges and other ways to limit the results.

Available at: Google Advanced Search

Alternatively, on the ordinary Google homepage (www.google.co.uk), go to the bottom of the page, click on Settings, and this will give you several options, one of which is Advanced Search.

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Google Alerts

If you have a particular topic of interest, you can set up a Google Alert that will send you an email (daily or weekly) when new information is published. This can either be a long-term interest, or short term – for example, if you are following the development and arrival on the market of a particular medication, or you are waiting for a document on a particular subject to be published.

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Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.com/)

Google Scholar (GS) is a search engine intended for academic research; it can best be described as Google, but only including results Google thinks are ‘scholarly’. The search functions are also slightly different to the ordinary Google interface.

What is included in Google Scholar?

Unlike bibliographic databases like Medline or Embase, GS does not start with a list of journals and then index the articles. It starts by finding the articles on the web, and deciding whether the articles fit their criteria for ‘scholarly’. So you will find research articles, conference abstracts, academic books, dissertations, and so on. It is less likely that you will find editorials. Articles without authors are often not included.

The definition of ‘scholarly’ is ‘what scholars think is scholarly’; if an article cites, or is cited by, other articles GS thinks are scholarly, then GS will class the original article as scholarly. Although this sounds like a relatively dubious way of identifying scholarly content, it does work reasonably well in that more scholarly articles are linked more strongly into the ‘scholarly web’. It does allow the inclusion of ‘grey literature’ (see below), which can be either an advantage or a disadvantage.

Although Google Scholar covers a vast number of articles, coverage is not equal across all sciences and all languages. Coverage by Google Scholar varies between disciplines; ‘hard’ sciences tend to be better covered than social sciences and humanities. Coverage for biomedical sciences – including medicine and pharmacy – is generally good. However, some publishers have refused to allow Google to crawl their site, resulting in results from that site being absent from Google Scholar.

Grey Literature

‘Grey literature’ is documents that are not published by commercial publishers (e.g. journal articles). It includes academic dissertations and theses, reports and papers produced by governments and other organisations, etc. These documents are unlikely to be indexed in the major bibliographic databases, but may still contain useful information, particularly if the subject is either very new or is not the kind typically published in academic journals.

However, GS does not include all grey literature. If it is important to find all such information, manual searching of individual organisation websites is likely to be required.

How are results ranked?

By default, Google Scholar ranks (sorts) articles by relevance. Its algorithm aims to evaluate ‘relevance’ by looking at the fulltext of each document, where it was published, who the author is, and also by how often and how recently the article has been cited in other scholarly literature.

You can change the sort order to sort by date (most recent first) by clicking ‘sort by date’ in the menu on the left-hand side.

How up to date is Google Scholar?

New papers are added to Google Scholar several times a week, whenever Google’s search robots find new material. Since this relies on the robots crawling the web, it is likely that articles on bigger websites with more traffic (e.g. BMJ) will be added faster than those from websites with less traffic.

Updates to existing records take longer because the robot has to recrawl the source website. For some of the larger websites, the speed of update is limited by the rate at which the website allows the Google robots to crawl the site.

Searching Google Scholar

Unlike Embase and Medline (and other such bibliographic databases), Google Scholar does not assign keywords to articles. Like Google, it searches the fulltext of the article itself. This can be either an advantage or a disadvantage.

It can be an advantage if you know what words the author is likely to have used in the article, but do not know what keywords a bibliographic database would assign, or if there are limited number of highly-relevant words that are likely to appear in the articles you want to find.

On the other hand, if your articles are not likely to contain unique words, searching via Google Scholar is likely to be more difficult than searching via a bibliographic database with a limited number of assigned keywords.

In short, when searching Google Scholar, you have to think like the author; when searching a bibliographic database, you have to think like a keyword-assigner.

• Operators are used as for Google.
• Searches are limited to 256 characters
• Only the first 1000 results are shown.
• ‘Nesting’ terms in brackets, e.g. (pharmacist OR technician) AND (hospital OR community) are not recognised by Google Scholar.

Google Scholar Advanced Search

Google Scholar Advanced Search is available via a popup-box over the ordinary search page. To find it:

1. Click on the three parallel lines on the top-left corner of the page.
2. Click on ‘Advanced Search’.

Google Scholar Advanced Search allows you to find articles:

• With all of a series of words in random order
• Containing an exact phrase
• With at least one of a list of words
• Without certain words

You can specify that your search terms appear anywhere in the article, or only in the title of the article.

• Articles authored by a particular name
• Articles published in a particular journal
• Articles dated between certain dates.

Some of this functionality does not require the Advanced Search screen; you can do it via the normal Google Scholar.

Citation Tracking

Identifying Citations

Google Scholar searches the whole of the web pages and documents it crawls. It can therefore identify citations which are mentioned on a web page (e.g. the reference list of an academic article) and include these in its search results list. Therefore, there is the possibility for a citation to appear in a Google Scholar search that does not correspond to any full document Google has located.

However, it should be noted that not all of what GS identifies as a ‘citation’ is what we might regard as a citation, as GS cannot differentiate between the citation of a journal article and a student handbook or library guide.

Cited By

For each document Google Scholar retrieves, it will also link to all the documents citing that document. The list can be accessed by clicking the ‘cited by’ link beneath each search result. This is very useful if you have found an article that is relevant but old, as it allows you to track more recent research.

Highly-Cited Articles

Highly-cited articles – those cited by large numbers of other articles – are often the most important and/or influential work in the relevant area. Not only can Google Scholar identify these, but it routinely uses the number of citations to rank search results.

Google Scholar ‘My Library’

To use the Google Scholar ‘My Library’ effectively, you need to be signed in to Google. If you do not have a Google account, you can sign up for one (free) at:

https://accounts.google.com/signup/v2/webcreateaccount?hl=en&flowName=GlifWebSignIn&flowEntry=SignUp

‘My Library’ allows you to save links to articles of interest so that you can read them later.

• To save an article: click on the star underneath each search result. The star will turn blue.
• To access your saved articles: click on the ‘My Library’ link on the top right hand corner of the page.

In the My Library page, you can manage your results. Tick the box by the result you wish to manage, and:

• Edit the way the result shows in your library by clicking the pen icon at the top of the page.
• Remove the article from your list by clicking the dustbin icon.
• Export the citation to reference management software (BibTeX, EndNote, RefMan, or CSV) by clicking the down-arrow icon.
• Add a label by clicking the label icon. If you have no labels yet, you can also create a new label here, or manage existing labels.

Getting Citations

To get a citation for an article you are interested in, click the “ (speech marks) button beneath the search result. This will bring up a pop-up window with several options – you can cut and paste the citation in one of the several styles it offers, or send the citation to your reference management software (BibTeX, Endnote, RefMan, RefWorks – if you use Zotero, then you don’t need to use this step, just click the yellow folder icon in the top bar of the browser as usual, and select the articles you wish to save, as usual).

Labels

Labels are a method for dividing your My Library contents into subject categories. You can add as many labels as you like to a search result.

Once you have some labels, a list of them will appear down the left hand side of the page. At the bottom of the list, there is a link for ‘Manage labels’; here, you can add new labels, edit, or delete labels.

This is useful if you wish to keep the results of several different searches in My Library, as you will be able to filter your My Library contents to see only those contents with the selected label.

Linking to your Trust Library

Google Scholar has the option to link to your local academic (including NHS Trust) library. This will give you a link directly to the fulltext via your library’s usual route.

To do this:

1. Click on the three horizontal lines in the top left-hand corner of the page.
2. Click on ‘settings’
3. Click on ‘library links’
4. Use the search box to search for your library. You can choose up to five libraries.
5. Select the libraries you want.
6. Click ‘save’.

Note: because Google Scholar indexes papers automatically, sometimes it will get the metadata wrong. If this is the case, it may not be able to link to an article in your local library’s holdings successfully. Therefore, if an article you are particularly interested in is not marked as held by your local library, it is still worth checking via Athens/your library website.

Google Scholar Button

The Google Scholar button is a web extension for your browser (including Chrome, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge – you can download it from the relevant web store). When you are on the page of a scholarly article, it displays the Google Scholar result for that article, including:

• A button to retrieve a citation (useful if you want to cite the article but are not using a reference manager, or don’t want to go via your reference manager)
• A link that will take you to a Google Scholar list of all articles citing the original article
• A link for a list of related articles
• A link for a list of different versions/pages for the same article
• A button to take you to a free fulltext article, if available.

If you are on a page with multiple results, you can select (highlight with your cursor) one of the results, then press the Google Scholar button, and you will get the above information for that article.

Google Scholar Alerts

If you have a topic of particular interest, and wish to be notified when new research is published, you can set up a Google Scholar Alert. This works in a similar way to Google Alerts, except just for Google Scholar results.

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