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Native American Research Tutorial

Searching the Internet: Search Engines

If you cannot find what you need by exploring Native American Subject Guides, you can use a search engine to explore the Web.

For a basic tutorial on Internet Searching, click here.

Here are some tips for finding Native American materials on the Internet. These examples use Google, but many of the principles are the same.

1. Try to be as specific as possible. For example, if you want to find more Native American Subject Guides, search for the entire phrases by placing it in quotations. This means that the words must be found together in this order in order to be retrieved. It will weed out Web pages that have all of the words, but are not actually subject guides.

Results

2. Search for specific domains (the last few letters of an Internet address).  Tribal governments often use the domain .nsn.us

To find information on tribal governments, go to Advanced Search in Google. Enter "tribe or tribal government" in the search field next to "with any of the words." Scroll down the page and enter ".nsn.us" in the "Domains" field. Be sure to click "Only."

Results:

3. Limit your search to the most up-to-date information. The last search still produced many hits. Let's try to get a list of only the most recently updated sites. Go to Advanced Search in Google. Do the same search, but now click on the "Last 3 months" in the "Date" option.

Results:

4. This is still a lot of pages. Let's try to narrow our search one more time. We want to the search engine to look for our search terms only in the title of the Web pages. Go back to Advanced Search in Google.

Results:

Searching for terms in the title alone will tend to provide results that are the Home or Main Page, rather than all of the pages from a tribal Web site.

The next lesson will provide information on how to evaluate Web resources.

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