Interior Design: Help with searching

One of the hardest bits to using Summon, or any other search engine, is picking good keywords to search with.

An important part of using Summon or another search tool, is your search terms or keywords. You need to decide which search terms to use and also how many search terms to use? Too few and you'll get lots of irrelevant results. Too many and you may miss some really good articles because the search brings back very few results.

This video gives some guidelines to help get you started with keywords.

We have lots of video guides to help you make the most of Summon on our Youtube playlist. 

For best results either view in fullscreen mode or visit us on YouTube.

• Phrasemarks ensure that you only find results where those words are together in that order e.g. “company reports”
• An asterisk will search for any group of letters e.g.market* will find market, markets, marketers, marketing etc
• A question mark will search for one letter e.g. organi?ation will find organization and organisation

Once you find information to use in your assignments, it is important to evaluate what you've found. This video from Western Libraries introduces the CRAAP test, useful to evaluate websites and other types of information.