I've run a quick search through Google for 'ergonegic aids', and come up with a list of many sites. A fast glance through the URLs of these sites will give me some clues as to their origin. Unfortunately, these clues are sometimes misleading: One of my results was from a commercial site, but comes from the sportsmedicine center at the University of Iowa. Another .com item on my result list, Ergogenic Aids, is actually a chapter in a medical textbook, written by a doctor with a long string of letters after his name. Another item with an org domain name, supposedly from a nonprofit organization turned out to be something quite different. There seemed to be a definite profit angle to the site, complete with a "New Product Line". What do you think the purpose of this website is?

Your controversy for chapter 10 talks about ergogenic aids. If we do a fast search on Google, we can come up with some definitions for ergogenic At the top of your result list will be definitions provided by Wikipedia, and by Merriam Webster's medical dictionary. Look at these two definitions and write down your own definition of ergogenic. #7 in my result list is an article from the Quackwatch author. Scan through this article and summarize what he thinks about ergogenic aids. Under the subheading Roots of Ergogenic Mythology, he says that it all started with the ancient belief that great strength could be obtained by eating the raw meat of what type of animal? Hit the back button and get back to your list of results. In the upper left corner, you should see a figure estimating the number of items that Google found:
We certainly don't want to look through 199,000 sites looking for something we can use, so let's try to narrow our search. We can use phrase searching by putting quotes around the phrase "ergogenic aids"	This tells the Google search engine to find only those articles with those 2 words together in that exact order. Now how many results did you get?
We can limit the search even more by adding another term, such as creatine. Put this extra term outside the quotes. This tells the search engine to find the articles that have the phrase AND the single word.	How many results do you get with this search?

We can limit the search even more by adding yet another term, or another phrase. Add "side effects" to your search and see what happens:	Now how many items do you have on your result list?
Boolean logic is named after the mathematician George Boole, and is a way that we can narrow our topic, and get fewer and more relevant results. The trick is to pick good terms.
Here's how it works. If we type in "ergogenic aids" creatine into the search box, Google will find all records that contain both terms. In this diagram, if all the records with "ergogenic aids" are represented by the left pink circle, and all the records with creatine are represented by the right green circle, the result list would be only those records falling into both circles, the overlapping middle purple section section. When you add another term (with the Boolean connector AND), your result list will be smaller.
When we add another term "side effects", our result list will get even smaller. The bottom orange circle represents all the articles with the phrase "side effects", exactly in that order. Now our result list will contain only the articles that have all three terms: "ergogenic aids" creatine "side effects" and in the diagram, will be only the small yellow area that falls in each of our circles. Everytime you add another term, connected by AND, your result list will get smaller.
There is an incredible amount of information out there on the Internet, but much of it takes careful culling to get past the advertisements. What if we want to find the medical research on royal jelly, which, according to your textbook, is promoted as enhancing athletic performance. Try this search in your Google search screen: "royal jelly" I tried this, and came up with 1,600,000 sites and they all looked like advertisements. So I changed my search to: "royal jelly" athletes and then I tried: "royal jelly" athletes research and then I tried: "royal jelly" athletes research studies and then I tried: "royal jelly" athletes research studies medical and even though my result list kept getting smaller, they seemed to be mostly commercial sites trying to sell me some royal jelly. I did find this item: "ENERGY" DRINKS: HELP, HARM OR HYPE - GSSI: Sports Science Library This could possibly be a scholarly unbiased source, and lure you in, but click on the link above and see if you can figure out who is really supporting the site. (Hint: look at the logo in the upper right corner.) This article makes a distinction between bad energy drinks and good sports drinks. Which category does their product fall into?

There's another Google search, a more specialized search that will let you search specifically through the scholarly and professional research: Google Scholar Google Scholar provides a simple way to get around most of the commercial literature and instead search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts and articles, from academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories, universities and other scholarly organizations.

Try a search for royal jelly and see the difference in your result lists. Where are these sites coming from? My list looks like most of the items are coming from scientific journals or professional organizations, rather than commercial sites trying to sell me supplements.

If you change your search to "royal jelly", with the quotation marks, you'll get even fewer sites. Remember, with phrase searching, we're telling the search engine to get only the sites that have those 2 words, in exactly that order. That's going to be a small sub-section of the overlapping circles for royal and jelly. If you want to limit these even more, you can add the term athletes. "royal jelly" athletes Every time you add another term, you should get fewer items on your result list.

	Summary
In this lesson, we've spent most of our time fine-tuning searches by adding terms using the Boolean connector AND, or by using phrase searching. In the Google search screen, the AND is implied if there is more than one term. Google will take the terms and search for each one individually, and then find the intersecting articles that contain all the terms. If you want Google to search for a phrase, you have to surround the terms with quotation marks. Then Google will find all the articles with those words in exactly that order. Remember that every time you add another term, your result list will get smaller and more finely tuned. If you pick your terms carefully, you should end up with a short list of articles that are exactly on your topic. There are other Boolean connectors that you might use: OR which will broaden your search and increase the number of hits on your result list. NOT will exclude certain records. If you wanted to see articles on the effects of the three-strikes laws in California, but you kept getting articles on baseball, you could search for three strikes NOT baseball NEAR will find records for you that don't quite contain your terms as a phrase, right next to each other, but very close. If you searched for "Nancy Drew", as a phrase, you would only get the records that have her name exactly like that. If you searched for "Nancy NEAR Drew", you would get records that use: Nancy Drew, Nancy Q. Drew, Drew, Nancy, and so on.
Now you can go back to the class homepage and find the Infocomp Quiz #4. You can take this quiz twice, but you might get different questions on the second try. Only your highest score will be saved.