Other Google utilities

Google has a number of utilities that you may find useful when you are searching. The important point to note is that Google keeps producing "helpful" resources so it is always best to keep an eye on what they have on offer. The ones we will flag here are:

  • Google Scholar which searches from the published academic literature rather than the entire web.
  • Google Books which limits its search to published books. Google has undertaken to scan most, if not all, books that have been published.
  • Google Alerts which allows you to set up a search bot that will report back to you via email the new appearance of a particular phrase.
  • Google Blogs which limits your searches to blogs which, in turn, may allow you a simple means of keeping track of the output of particular blogs.
  • Google Trends which allows you to look at past and present search trends.
  • Google Ngram Viewer which allows you to map the frequency of terms in books over time.
  • Google Refine excellent resource for tidying messy data sets.
  • Google Dataset search a new resource for locating datasets.
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