AFRC 400 - Research Project

Facebook Advanced Search

Once you are logged into Facebook, do an initial search with your keywords, the search filters will appear next to your search results.

You can search the following areas: All, Posts, People, Photos, Videos, Marketplace, Pages, Places, Groups, Apps, Events, and Links. (Marketplace and Apps are least likely to yield any results for this project.)

You can filter by Source, type of post, location, and date.

Note: Click on image to see larger version.

You can utilize a number of advanced search features in Google to refine your results and get to better sources, faster. You enter site: into the search bar to limit to a specific site (such as nytimes.com) or domain (such as .edu). Similarly, you can also search for a specific type of file results. As an example, entering file:.pdf will only return PDF results, no websites. Quotation marks will force Google to search for words as a phrase. A minus sign in front of a word will remove it from the results. Also, you limit date ranges by enter a start year, two dots, and an end year without any spaces. 

*Pro Tip: Some internet sources (cough Wikipedia cough) may not be appropriate to site in an academic paper, but they have have references, links, or additional readings that could be appropriate. Evaluation is extremely important on the internet, which can be a great place to start, but rarely where you will finish your research.