A Google search tip illustrated

Do you ever come across a really useful .pdf on the web that is clearly a chapter or section of a larger work?  

How can you find the rest of the material?  

Here is a real example. Today I was searching for materials on 'scaffolding learning' and I came across a terrific .pdf. When you look at the URL at the top of the screenshot, you can see it is chapter 3. Hmm, what about the other chapters? Maybe I would like to read them, too? How can I do that? 

How to search inside a website

First I truncate the URL.  This means isolating the main part, the home page, of the website. Here's how: 

Take the full URL at the top 

http://www.tllg.unisa.edu.au/lib_guide/gllt.pdf

and delete the bits at the end until you get to this:

http://www.tllg.unisa.edu.au/ 

Copy this part ....Then go to Google Advanced Search - if you are not sure where that is, well, Google it. 

Then search inside the website you have found by scrolling down and pasting the truncated URL into the 'site or domain' box.  

Also choose .pdf for the 'file type'.  

Click on the big blue button at the bottom of the page to see the results. What we are doing is searching inside this website for .pdf files rather than looking across the entire universe of the Internet. 

Here are the results. I got a lovely 100 page+ book :). 

How can you use this with students?

I like to use this with students. If you send the class to the Internet and ask them to search for something, you might get some very unsafe results!  But if I ask the students to search inside a safe website, like the British Museum, they will only get results that are safe.  

You can also teach this tip to parents. For example, you can help primary school children's parents search together with their children to find a suitable game on the CBeeBies website. Use Google Advanced Search and put the word 'games' into the top box on that page. Search inside the CBeeBies website so paste their website URL into the 'site or domain' box.  Scroll down to the bottom of the page to click on the big blue button. 

How many results do you get? 

I got more than 15,000 results. Plenty to keep kids busy over the summer holidays, right? 

Try it. See if you get the same results :).