For your group assignment, you need to use a website with a .edu or .gov domain. In most web browsers, you can easily limit your search to a specific domain. Here's how you do it in Google:
Type in your search terms, then put site:.edu or site:.gov
You will need to search one domain (.edu or .gov) at a time. If you put both, Google will try to find results that have both domains, which do not exist.
If you are using a different browser other than Google, use that browser to do a search for the name of the browser and a phrase like, "limit search to domain." Most browsers have this feature, and the information on how to do it should be readily available.
See below for more information about website domains, and a few more searching tips!
After choosing your web source and selecting a fact, you will need to create a citation for the source. Most web sources will use a citation like the examples shown on this page in the section "A page on a website."
For your convenience, here is an image of the relevant examples. You may need to mix and match elements from the two examples in order to craft your citation. For instance, the first example shows a citation for a page that has a named author but does not provide a creation date. The second example shows a citation for a page that has no named author, but does have a creation date. If your source has neither an author nor a date, you will need to look at parts of both examples to see what to do.
Countries can determine who may receive a website within their two-letter domain. Examples include:
Watch out for...
How you talk about something might be different than how an expert talks about it. Information from experts tends to use more formal language and targets a specific aspect of something, but in everyday language, we typically use more general terms. So if you are looking for something written by someone knowledgable, take time to find out what words they use to talk about it.
Most of the time, words like "the" "a" and "an" are ignored, since they aren't seen as contributing meaning. However, when you search in google, every word is searched on. In some cases, those words have less impact on the search, but in the examples below, you can see how they significantly change the results!
Capitalization doesn't make a difference in your search, but some punctuation can make a really big difference! You can use the # to search hastags, quotation marks to search for an exact phrase or the minus sign to remove a word from your search. You can learn more about these features on the Google Advanced Search page.
