Ready Reporter

It’s the time when professors are readying their syllabi and class preps. I always do a session on how to be a good researcher early in every journalism class.

So as I was working on that today I found a great new article on about.com about searching, “How Proper Research Works.”And if you can give this site 15 minutes, you will be a better searcher…and a better journalist.

Paul Gil, an about.com guide and the person behind @aboutnetbasics, offers a concept I like — determining whether you need to do hard research, soft research, or both.  Hard research, he writes, is facts, stats and scientific information. This is the type journalists generally want.

What he calls soft research is cultural or opinion-based content including consumer product reviews, forums and blogs.

Check out his tricks and tips on which search engines to use, how to stockpile and then how to filter.  Let me know below what works for you or other tips.

If you’re like most people,  you don’t scroll down the page of results from a search engine. Research shows most people look at the top 3 or 5. That means you might be missing a great new feature from Google called In Depth.

Nowadays you get more than just a list of results for your search.  Have you noticed that Google, and the other search engines are now providing you more. They’re guessing at other related content that would interest you. For example: definitions, short bios, maps,  similar search terms and more.

Look to the bottom of the screen on Google for a section labeled “in-depth articles.” It only appears on certain broad topics, and Google just rolled it out this week.  For example, here’s what is at the bottom of the page when you search on population growth:

Sure, it’s a selection of what Google thought was important – -here National Geographic, Guardian and New Yorker are the sources. Seems to me to be a great tool for journalists looking to background themselves on a topic.

Read more about it from Google and check it out.

Today’s great Google tip is how to find more sites like one you know of.  Especially if you are researching something that is not very common, you might need more information than the one specialized website you have just found. That’s where the related search comes in.

If you use this format you can find similar sites to one you found helpful:

“key word” related:website-url

You put in the website address, minus the “www” for website-url

For example, if I run a website for a Central New York interfaith group, Women Transcending Boundaries.  If you came across this site in researching something related to interfaith issues, you might want to find other similar sites.  So try this search in Google: related:wtb.org, Here is what would come up:

Try it the next time you need more information on  topic.

Today’s helpful tip is on how to filter searches in another way — by a  certain website title or address.

If you put intitle: or allintitle” before terms then Google will look for those terms you list in the web address (properly known as URL, uniform resource locator).

So let’s say I’ve read several stories in the last week and want to go back to one about CEO Marissa Mayer, but I can’t remember where I read it. I try a few websites and browse my history, but the clock is ticking and I can’t find it.  I do remember a phrase in the title was “work in progress.”  So I do this search in Google:

“marissa mayar” intitle:work in progress 

Here’s what pops up, with the story I want right at the top:

You can also use inurl: if you remember part of the address but can’t find the site, as in:

allinurl: google faq 

As Google explains in its helpful page on search operators,  this search returns documents that both google and faq in the URL (address), such as:  www.google.com/help/faq.html

Try it out and see if you’re not a better searcher.  For more of these ways of filtering searches see the Google page underlined above.

Filtered search — that’s another of my favorite tricks to help you be a better searcher when using Google or another search engine.

If you know that you want to search just one website, or you know the address of an authoritative site that might have the information, then why search the whole humongous database of that search engine, just search at one particular website. You’ll get fewer and better results.

So here is how to filter a search to one website. While the list of Emmy nominations is easy to find many places, if you saw something in Hollywood Reporter about them and want to go back to it, try this search which follows the standard template:

“key phrase” site:domain.zzz

So it would be

“emmy nomination” site:hollywoodreporter.com

or

emmy list 2013 site:hollywoodreporter.com

Sure you can go to the Hollywood Reporter and look for its search box and type the search in there, but this direct method saves time.

Another example:  This morning I caught part of a fascinating story on National Public Radio about social science research related to people’s unconscious bias for race. I wanted to listen again. I remember that the reporter’s name is  Shankar. If I just put in Shankar race in Google I get 1.4 million hits and what comes up first is not even close, as you see here.

The better search is

Shankar race site:npr.org

It gives me only 202 results, the one I want is at the top, plus I get a bio on the reporter and then another story he did on race, as shown below.

One of the new social media apps that has great promise for reporting  is ban.jo, as outlined in the last post (below).

But when touting her new product before an audience of investigative reporters at IRE last month, Jennifer Peck was quick to note that while you can be sure the tweet, post, pin or picture on ban.jo came from that location, that doesn’t mean it is necessarily valid.

Remember this fake photo:

It came from the right location, but it was a photoshopped image, according to Mashable’s article on seven fake Hurricane Sandy photos.

So you need to verify photos that you find on social media:

• use other sources to compare
• use more than online sources
• figure out who  the original source is
• talk to the original source, ideally by phone, to determine if s/he is really that person and has reason to know or have this  information.

To check if a photo has been changed, see this Ready Reporter post on how to debunk photos.

For more helpful tips, I recommend this blog post “how to verify information from tweets” from Steve Buttry, a digital editor at the Journal Register company.