I've run a quick search through Google for 'ergogenic 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, from Amazon.com, selling books. Another item on my result list is from an educational site, from the University of Chicago quarterly review of biology. Another item with a .com domain name, is an article from Diet.com. In order to find out anything about them, I clicked on the Home button at the top right corner, then scrolled all the way to the bottom, but still couldn't find out anything about who maintains or supports this site. Can you find any information about them? Any names or institutions associated with this site?

Narrowing your search
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 Lower 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. Just below the search box, you should see a figure estimating the number of items that Google found:
We certainly don't want to look through more than 535,000 sites looking for something we can use, so let's try to narrow our search. We can use phrase searching by putting quotation marks around our terms: "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? It should be fewer, but more focused on what you want.
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? This should be fewer again, the same list as above, but with only those articles that also contain the word creatine somewhere on the page.

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? This one should be smaller yet. Every time you add a new term, your list will be smaller.
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 three circles. Every time 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: Royal Jelly Benefits and Side Effects from Livestrong.com, the health information site formerly associated with Lance Armstrong. Glance through this article and see if you can find answers to those 5 questions: Who is the author and what are the author's qualifications? (You can click on her name at the top of the page to find more information.) What institution or organization is supporting the website? (Livestrong) Is there any inherent bias? (Are they possibly trying to sell you something?) When was the article written? Is there any mention of research, names of researchers or institutions, that we could use for further investigation?

Here's another way to look at it: Suppose your instructor (in a live class) asked everyone from Hollister to stand up. Maybe half the class would stand. Then she asked of those students standing, how many have older sisters? Everyone without an older sister should sit down. Half of the students standing would sit down. Then she asked of those students still standing, how many have children. If you don't have children, please sit down. Now the number of students left standing will be even smaller.

You can see that every time she adds another search term (live in Hollister, older sister, children), the search results will get smaller and smaller. The students still standing would be the small yellow section where all three circles overlap.

Google Scholar
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. Glance through your list of results and see if you can tell what types of websites the articles are coming from. On this result list, you'll have to hover your cursor over the blue titles and then check the status line (at the bottom of the screen) to see the actual address of the site. Many of them will be .com (commercial), belonging to book sellers, like Amazon. Where is another large percentage coming from?
Here's one of the items on my result list. Click on the box below and see if you can find answers to the questions on the right:	What journal did this article appear in? When was the article first published (online)? Honey, propolis and royal jelly are all products originating where? What are some of the functions of these products, as used in traditional and folk medicine?

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. With both of these tools, we are narrowing our search, limiting the articles that will be allowed into the result list, hopefully to just the articles we can use. Boolean AND 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. In our example above, if we searched for: royal OR jelly we would get all the articles with the term 'royal' (including everything about the latest royal baby) AND all articles with the term 'jelly', obviously too many unrelated articles. Usually the OR connector is used with specific scientific names or drugs that have a brand name plus a generic name: "royal jelly" OR royalactin The main thing to remember is that using the AND connector will get fewer results (because all the words need to be present), and using the OR connector will get more results (because only one of the words has to be present). 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 The search engine will delete all the articles that have the word baseball in the article. NEAR will find records for you that don't quite contain your terms as a phrase, right next to each other, in a specific order, 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, Anna Nancy, and so on.

Phrase Searching Look again at the difference between Boolean AND searches, and phrase searches. royal jelly as a search on two terms will get all the articles with both the word royal and the word jelly, including articles on how the royal family of Thailand prefers mango jelly. "royal jelly" will get fewer articles, because the 2 terms must show up together, in that particular order. In the world of research, more is not always better. Those articles that do show up will probably be precisely on your topic, and you won't have to weed through a lot of articles on jelly that is a royal blue color.

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.