1. Google (and most other search engines) are advertising businesses

You don't have to pay every time you google something because Google's primary business is advertising. Companies pay to post ads that often come up at the top of the search results. Google also collects information about you to tell companies who they should advertise to. Every search you do, every click you make when logged into a Google service gives them more info about you. Being aware of this helps you understand why certain things come up first in your results.

2. Search engines can be manipulated

Search engines rely on an automatic tool know as spiders that crawl around the web to harvest information about a website. This relies on keywords, metadata (information about the webpage), links from other sites, the content itself, and so on. People with websites want to be on the top of your web results and therefore use all kinds of ways to convince these spiders their page is the most relevant. In rare cases, people with bad intentions will do extremely sneaky things to make their results that are not the kind of stuff you'd want show up at the top. Clicking on the top result is not enough--you need to think through your results critically with an awareness that people have worked hard to make sure you click on their pages. 

3. Google (and other search engines) only capture a tiny fraction of the web

Just like an iceberg that is mostly underwater, the portion of the internet that search engines can see is small part. A lot of information on the internet is not indexed or findable through normal search engines because it is behind some kind of security. This includes things like private business records, some legal documents, health information, and anything that you need to subscribe to in order to access. The library has a bunch of subscriptions to academic databases because a lot of research and other publications are behind paywalls. This is a key reason you need to think beyond Google when doing your research.

Even with these worries, Google is very useful. When using it to research, here are some helpful tips for doing your best searches possible. 

• If you are searching for an exact phrase, but it in " ". For example, if you want to find pages about the movie The Color Purple you could search for "the color purple" to bring up results that only have those words in that order.
• You can exclude words by putting a - in front of them. Say you wanted things about Black Panther comics but not the movie, you could search marvel black panther -movie
• You can search a specific site or type of site with by putting site:  in your search. For example, if you want to see articles from the New York Times about Central Park, you would type in central park site:nytimes.com. You can also limit it by domain (the stuff after the dot in web addresses). For example, if you want stuff about taxes but only from official government sites you could do taxes site:.gov

There are also a bunch of different options to limit or build your search if you use Google's advanced search feature.

In addition to article databases, the library also subscribes to image databases for you to use in your research. 

This Subject Guide explains some options, including JSTOR (formerly Artstor). JSTOR/Artstor is a great resource because most of the items in have been approved for non-commercial uses (like presentations or papers for classes). They also have some phenomenal high resolution versions that you can zoom into to see details and textures. The main source of images are museums. So the kinds of images you'll find tend to be more fine arts or other things that museums would own and display. JSTOR is most useful with an account. You'll need to be on-campus to log-in the first time to create your account. 

What about finding images online?

You may wonder why you would want to use a database like JSTOR instead of just doing a Google Image search. The main reason is copyright. As future creative professionals, you will earn your living by getting paid for the creative work you do. You might not think that downloading an image from the internet for your presentation is a huge deal, but remember that doing so keeps other creatives from being recognized and rewarded for their hard work.

This doesn't mean that everything online is off-limits for your use. A lot of creators have decided they would rather have their work used freely rather than tightly controlled. One way they let people know this is through the use of Creative Commons licenses. Images and other resources like this will be clearly labeled with a symbol that looks like this: 

There are distinctions to the kind of uses, but in general this symbol means you can download the file and use it for your writing and presentations. 

There are some decent search engines for Creative Commons images, including Wikimedia Commons and Creative Commons Search.