Content Curation World

Google Research is a little-known sidebar available inside Google Drive documents and presentations which allows you to do just-in-time Google searches and to easily curate relevant results, including images, videos, text excerpts, links with full automatic attribution references, into the document or presentation you are preparing.

The Google Research sidebar facility can be called at anytime up by simply going to the Tools menu and selecting "Research" or by selecting any word in your text and then typing Ctrl+Alt+Shft+I.

Once in view, the mini Google Research sidebar, is ready to search across not just the Google standard web results, including news, images, videos and Google Scholar databases, but is also able to instantly filter and sort for you relevant Quotes, Dictionary items, as well as stuff from your own Google Drive documents and tables.

To identify more rapidly relevant resources inside this search sidebar, Google offers the option to "preview" any result, by opening an additional sidebar showcasing a resized view of the web page in question).

Once identified a relevant resource you can either drag and drop it right into your open Google document / presentation (great for images which will also automatically credit)*, or "insert the resource as a link", or "cite" it (by being able to select between MLA; APA and Chicago citation formats).

I have found the Google Research Tool extremely useful, handy and simple to use. If you are researching, writing or curating any kind of article, presentation or report in Google Drive, I highly recommend you try it yourself and let me know what you think of it.

Free to use.

http://drive.google.com 

*I am not suggesting to freely re-use images of others simply because they are accessible via the Google Research Tool. Generally, It is not a good idea to re-use other people images without appropriate authorization from the author.

Even though Google has become very good at understanding and providing relevant results for many popular queries, many search users are getting lazy and taking those results as currency. 

John Ball writes on Search Engine Land: "People don’t think, analyze, or really even understand how search works anymore. They just assume it will work and they’ll get the results they need. 

This is a very real trend, and likely to continue."

And he goes on: "For example, consider Google Now — no searching required, just results you’re likely to need and can further refine. Also, consider Google Glass. Glass doesn’t even support advanced searching — it’s all short, to-the-point answers, likely based on the Knowledge Graph, which is rapidly expanding."

If you are a journalist, researcher or content curator, you are likely uninterested in such auto-selected results and prefer to dig, explore more and vet before drawing a conclusion.

To go beyond the surface of Google forcedly limited search spectrum, it is of great help to be able to use Google search modifiers. These are manual commands that you can insert in your search queries and that allow you to ask to Google to bring you the results you want in the way you want it.

If you are not familiar with these or have not been using them in a while, I do suggest to scan through them again as they can be real life-savers in many a situation. 

Very useful for any good journalist, researcher or curator.

Useful. Good examples. 8/10

Full article: http://searchengineland.com/top-10-search-modifiers-why-they-matter-what-they-are-how-to-use-them-173343