The other day, I was manning the reference desk with Drexel’s engineering librarian Jay Bhatt. Jay was helping a student learn to use library resources, and as they were finishing up, Jay asked the student, “So, what do you think about Google now?”
Music swelled and the student looked up with tears in his eyes. “As God as my witness, I’ll never use Google again,” he promised.
Or something like that happened — perhaps not quite that melodramatic.
Even though librarians are always directing our patrons to other resources, Google is an important research tool.
Here are a few effective ways to use Google for business research:
- To look at public companies’ annual reports to share holders.
- To find a professional association helpful to your research.
- To make sure that you have a correct citation for an article – you’d be amazed by how many times these are slightly wrong.
- To find a local chamber of commerce for a city you’re researching
- To locate an image
- To effectively navigate through online government publications, including the Census Bureau, Bureau of Economic Statistics, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics
Google isn’t always the answer, but it certainly makes sense to use this valuable resource judiciously.
* Originally published on February 28, 2006. For business research tips & tricks in real-time, subscribe to LIB-BIZ-KIT .
I sometimes use Google as a starting point for legal research. It provides citations to primary sources (citations to the statutes, case law, or even regulations). I see Google as the Rock-n-Roll of the 21st Century. Old timers fear it as the devil and the rest of us just learn the difference between ABBA and Eric Clapton.
Comment by Karen Schneiderman — August 3, 2008 @ 1:23 pm