Google has always been my primary tool for research. It is so ingrained in our society today to consider it the ultimate source of information, that even I find myself from time to time telling a friend to "google it" whenever they ask me a question I may not know the answer to, or may just be too lazy to answer.
Google Scholar can be very reliable when trying to find sources quickly, because it is as simple as typing a few words into the search engine bar, and sitting back to watch as the thousands of links appear, all ready for your perusal. However, its reliability can fall sort. Some links no longer work because either the site has situated somewhere else on the vast, emptiness of the internet, or the material - usually the articles or journals that you are most interested in, are almost one hundred percent positive have just the right information for your essay or short assignment, have to be paid for in order to be seen.
And the fact is, with Google, everything is chance. You never know if you're going to find reliable, time-relevant information that can be used without scouring more than a dozen pages, more often than not. Google, also, breeds a lack of originality, because if you, and twenty other students, are all looking for information on the same topic, and you all use google - because what else is there to use? - you'll probably find your sources overlapping more than once, which is all fine and good when it comes to reliability, but it probably turns out to be very repetitive.
Perhaps it is just a bias I hold toward the library, which I have always seen as the ultimate source of information. While library databases can sometimes be tricky, and take a bit more practice to get used to than Google, which most of us have been using for as long as we can remember having the internet, I believe that they have much more information, and those articles which would previously be locked from us on Google Scholar are often part of the library's collection, which is far more extensive, and available to us for free as students.
Library databases also allow for a much more specific scope when it comes to a research topic. With Google, while it is possible to narrow it, one often finds less useable material, and therefore broadens the search and hopes for the best. Library databases allow us to delve through lists of relevant articles, books and journals so that we find the best possible information that could be used in our work, which is why I now prefer to use them if I know I have an assignment coming up, although I won't be able to give up my Google fixation any time soon.
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