Nathan Brown searched online for information on building energy efficiency improvements. He began with broad keywords in Google and Google Scholar, then refined his search terms and used filters. Google Scholar helped narrow results but standard Google yielded more relevant information. Library databases were less complete and harder to use than Google tools. Through iterative searching across search engines and refining keywords, he was able to identify useful reports, articles, and other sources.

1. How a Student Searched Online
Nathan Brown
Graduate Student in Architecture
SSP Conference
June 8, 2007

2. beginning
• Goal: look for pdfs, citations, or other
information relevant to the research
task
• First: I identified the keywords possible
building energy efficiency improvements
us.

3. Searching using generic Google engine

4. Links to results of U.S. reports

5. Searching with Google Scholar

6. Refining keywords

7. Using Google Scholar to identify articles citing a given article

8. Further refining of keywords

9. Further refining of keywords

10. Filtering unwanted results with a Boolean and date range

11. Using refined keywords in generic Google engine

12. Following links through EIA

13. Identifying resources through the library: journal indexes

14. Attempting to find articles in other scholarly search engines

15. Searching through specific databases

16. in summary
• Google Scholar provided many intuitive
features that helped narrow the search
• The standard Google search yielded
more relevant information for this
particular question
• Indices linked through the library
seemed less complete than Google and
were not as easy to use.