4.2: Keywords

Keywords

Like a lot of other technology, search engines have their own rules. Knowing these rules will help you be more effective in your research. The first rule of search engines is that searching with full sentences is not as effective as searching with keywords. Keywords are usually nouns or short phrases (2 or 3 words that make up a single idea), and they are the most important words in your topic. If you did the mind map exercise suggested in the previous section, you should already have a good set of keywords to work with. But don't forget to be on the lookout for additional keywords as you proceed through the search process. For example, you might notice useful search terms in the citations you discover after you run a search.

Why should you search with keywords instead of full sentences? Because search engines search for every single word you put into the search bar. This means that your search results can quickly become cluttered with useless resources if you include words that aren't relevant to your topic (think the, is, it, a, etc.). Searching with full sentences makes the search engine look for extra, unnecessary words and impacts your search results.

Let's look at an example.

I've decided on the following research question: What are the impacts of social media addiction on teenagers? So, I go to Google and put the entire question in the search bar. Here's what I get:

Figure 4.3.1 (CC BY-NC 4.0; Clackamas Community College Library)

Over 22 million results! That's way too many. Let's try cutting out the unimportant words in that sentence and only keeping the words that are really important for my topic:

Figure 4.3.2 (CC BY-NC 4.0; Clackamas Community College Library)

Now I see 15.7 million results. That's still a lot, but much better than before! Those extra words (what, are, the, impacts, of, on) added 7 million extra results to my search.

Remember: keywords will be the most important words directly related to your topic. It's important to search with keywords so your results are as relevant to your topic as possible.

This page was adapted from Keywords by Clackamas Community College Library, used under CC BY-NC 4.0.