Whenever I am doing any kind of research – academic, personal interest or basic facts that I’ve forgotten – I always start with Google. Even though I use many other tools and strive to use academic research tools but I start with the most popular search engine and my homepage. I am sure that Google would be pleased to hear this, as this seems to be their goal – to be the go-to search engine, home page, news source and email address.
Google has a number of helpful ways to refine a search, including the Google News Archive. The homepage offers a selection of today’s news from a variety of well known sources (NBC, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, etc) as well as videos and images. Google allows users to personalize their News page, by adjusting how much World, US, Business, Election and other customized options coverage you want to read. You can also adjust the sources from which your news is found. You can decide how much news you want to read from Fox News or from the New York Times. As helpful as it is to customize your news sources, this also limits one’s world view. If I can decide that I never want to see conservative news sources on my Google News page, I am less likely to read opinions that are not my own. But I am more likely to choose Google News, because I find what I want.
When you are ready to search Google News Archives, there are a variety of different search features. I can search for specific words or phrases in an entire article or in the body or the headline of the article. I can also select a range of dates that the article was published, as well as the sources and the location. When I searched for my topic – the Uprising of the 20,000 – I found a mix of current and past arcticles. I was able to customize the date range between which I wanted to find articles about the Uprising. Although there were results having little to do with my topic, there are also news reports on the event. Overall, this is a helpful tool to find news articles about a person or event at any given time or location, because there are so many customization options. However, the results are limited to those accessible to the public. For a more comprehensive search of news archives, I would probably turn to the NYU database search and utilize an archive to which NYU subscribes. There is an option to view news articles within your search that are not free, but this brings up many links to which access is limited or costly.
As always, when using Google, there are ads on the right hand side of the page; ads designed to look like the links for which you are searching. In my search, ask.com ads regularly appeared on the right of my screen. But since ads appear on nearly every website now, they are easy to ignore. The search customization tools available on Google Archive News make me keep Google as my first choice for researching. In addition to the basic search options, I can go a little deeper before moving on to the sea of databases available to NYU students, hopefully with some key search words to help me dig through the resources available online.
Reblogged this on Arcis2012's Blog.