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Health 101 Signature Assignment

Web sites

You are permitted to use one reputable web site for this assignment. Be sure that any sites you use are affiliated with a reputable organization AND were published within the past 7 years. The two simple Google search tricks listed below will help you eliminate many unhelpful results, but you must still carefully evaluate each site. If you have any questions as to the reliability of a given result, contact me, a librarian, or your instructor.

Domain Limiters

For your Signature Assignment, .org (professional organization), .edu (educational institutions), or .gov (government entities) domains will almost always provide you with the best results. Luckily, there is a very simple trick in Google that will help you narrow down to a given domain!

Just type site: after your keyword search and insert a non-.com domain. For example, the Google search for sunscreen benefits returns millions of results from all domains, and the first page features unwanted advertisements and "informational articles" from cosmetics companies attempting to sell their products.

However, the search for sunscreen benefits site:.org returns less than 1% of those results, with sites from reputable publishers such as Johns Hopkins, The Skin Cancer Foundation, the American Academy of Dermatology, and MD Anderson dominating the first page.

Date limiters

Because you are required to only use web sites published within the last 7 years, it is strongly recommended that you use Google's date limiter for all of your searches. To limit by date, first perform your search and then click on the Tools button beneath the search bar, as shown below.
 

Location of Custom Date limiter on Google search

A drop-down menu titled "Any time" will appear beneath the search bar. Click on it and select "Custom range..." Google's Custom Date Limiter will then appear, as shown below. Enter your date range and click "Go." Adding the date limiter to the sunscreen benefits site:.org search narrowed us down to 177 results, compared to the 167 million we received when we search sunscreen benefits alone. Please use these limiters! As always, contact me or the library should you have any questions.

Google's custom date range limiter