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Lesson 2.5: Different kinds of content

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Contents:

This is lesson 2.5 and this is all about the different kinds of content you can get to through using Google and its normal mode. As you know we've got web content, we've talked about image content, a little bit about video content, but there's more!

So what we're going to talk about is the different kinds of ways you can get to search that different kind of spaces of content. You know already that we’ll search regular web content, but we will also blend in things like videos and images and so on, but we can also search just within each of those different kinds of content. So as you know we have web pages, we have images, we've got videos including YouTube, but including more than just YouTube. We also have something called Scholar which is our collection, our index of the scholarly literature which also includes things like legal opinions. We have Google patents, we have Google News, we have Google books and so on and so on.

Let's talk about how to actually go find stuff in each of those content areas. So let's start with what is probably the world's best-known, best-loved search, which is for cats. So I'm going to do a search for cats, and as you can see at the top, as I mentioned we blend different kinds of content together.

So we have in the very top different videos, on the right hand side the knowledge panel about cats, but we've also got the regular web stuff over here on the left hand side and about halfway down more videos, people also ask, you know that's the usual web stuff, but if you go back to the top and click on the tab labeled images you'll see all the Google images that we've discovered by crawling about cats.

We've talked a little bit about the tabs across the top, for example, anime cats, baby cats and so on, but we also have the ability to click on the videos tab, what you see right here and now we get just videos of cats. If you do the search just in regular Google you'll get videos included with the regular web results, but if you click just on the videos tab you get nothing but videos, just as we saw nothing but images in the Images tab.

And of course if you click on News you get news about cats, you get shopping about cats just by clicking on the shopping tab. You can also find...let's go back to home, we'll redo our search, for say dogs this time, and I want to show you a secret to other places inside of a Google search which is this thing called More.

If you click on More you'll get a different set of options, so these are sort of one level down but they're important because here I can click for example on Google Books about dogs and so here we now get nothing but the index that Google has made about Google books that we've scanned and we found from digital sources and so on and so there are roughly 115 million books about dogs, who knew. As you can see this is actually quite a long list and when we talk about books in detail I'll show you more about how to filter by various properties of these books, but right now I just want to show a little bit more about More, so let's go back to More. Now that we've clicked on books, let's see what else we have. Well we have finance, we have flights, more shopping and so on, so let me look for books about cats. Let’s do it that way, so now we get more books about cats and there are 71 million books about cats I don't know why it's different, why there are fewer books about cats but that seems to be the case but let's go back to More.

Remember More? So now at the very bottom of More is this tab called Personal which allows me if I click on it to search my personal content, which in this case is going to be images about my cat.

This is my beautiful cat, and it's important for you to notice that this is only your photos, so in essence what we're doing is saying you can search all of the universe but you can also search just your photos by name. So you can search for, for example, names of people in your family if you've tagged them or by location. My point is you can search all this content. You can select the different content types by using the tabs at the very top.

So now let's talk about Google patents. The way I get to Google patents, since it's not listed there under the More option is I search for [Google Patents] I know, obvious right?

But that's the way I actually do it, and that's the way I recommend you do it, because you should not remember the URL, it's faster than bookmarking it and looking through all your bookmarks.

I just search for Google patents, and you click on the first result and we are now in the mode of searching just for patents, so let's do that topic again; let's search for patents about cats, because you will discover there are in fact a bunch of different patents about cats, who knew?

On the left hand side you have some filter information, here you can search for synonyms or check dates and so on, check the inventor and things like that now that's good but if you really a patent searcher you probably want pretty fine grained control over your patent search so what I do is go back to Google home and I search for [Google patents advanced search]. Now the reason I'm doing that is to get to this page which gives me a lot of options.

So here you can search for particular patents by number, patents by title, patents with a particular inventor, name of signee name and so on and so on. So if you're a patent person, say you're an inventor or legal attorney or something you can actually go and get the information this way, but we'll cover that in an advanced class, I just wanted to point that out to you. Right so it's important to know about patents that they're English only, however we have recently incorporated lots of patents from EU. I believe it's pretty close to complete, but it may be a few percent missing. It incorporates all of the United States, Japan, Canada and so on, so EU plus a few other countries, so it's an incredibly great resource for you if you're trying to do discovery or you’re trying to do patent follow-up.

Now let's talk about Google Scholar. Scholar is the collection of the scholarly literature, that is, articles published in well received, well respected journals, conferences, books and so on. It basically represents the output of the scientific community, so if you want to find something with really high authority published in a well-known journal, Google Scholar is your friend, and again you could type in the URL directly, but guess what I'm going to do, type in [Google Scholar] and this first hit is it.

I go to that link and now if we do a search, we're not searching in books, we're not searching images, we’re not searching video, we’re just searching what we've collected from the scholarly literature.

Let's search [cats] again and what you'll see here is a bunch of articles about cats, about 1.8 million of them. People have written a lot about cats; now some of this is going be a little technical like the very first article here is the evaluation of the diagnostic criteria for ankylosing spondylitis. This may not be your cup of tea but there are people who care about that a lot. In particular, this little number here cited by 5324. That's the number of other articles that refer to this one, so this is probably a decent article if you're interested in ankylosing spondylitis.

My point is that this is a really great resource if you're trying to search for things about cats or say coral bleaching or climate change or whatever your topic is this is a great way to index to search just that literature. Now, one of the things to know about Google Scholar is it has also a great deal of legal content. The legal content is only in the English interfaces so if you're in Germany and you're using German as your default language you will have to switch it to English in order people that search for it.

It also is only the collection of US case law it's primarily of interest in former British colonies, anyplace that's inherited the British common law system. Now, as I mentioned only US legal opinions are included, but let me show you this in detail. Again, search [Google Scholar] but this time I'm going to do something slightly different. I'm going to search for [cats] again but instead of just searching the scholarly literature I'm going to click on this button for case law.

This now allows me to then filter by federal courts at California courts or whatever. My point is you can actually now search case law about cats. I do my query and here we go, cats appears as a title, the name of a company. If you search through here there are in fact lots and lots of case law, lots of legal opinions and so on about cats. For example, the state versus 15 impounded cats. This is an interesting resource and in particular if you're looking for a particular case say [Roe v. Wade] this is the fastest way I know to get to that amount of online content. This is a great way to do this and again on the left hand side you can filter by different time spaces, case law, federal courts or California courts. You can select the court you want to search from. Here you go, really great for searching case law in the United States.

Now what I'd like you to do now that you know about all these different kinds of resources within Google is go ahead and do the next activity. Explore a little bit to see what you can find in each of these different spaces. It's an interesting thing to compare what you find in videos versus images versus news on any particular topic so go ahead and explore that.

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(Updated 2/5/19 A. Awakuni Fernald)