Websites are a bit trickier than other types of sources when you're doing academic research. With books, journals, newspapers and other types of databases that the Library pays for, you can use those resources knowing that a professional librarian has vetted them and found them to meet some generally-accepted research standards. Websites, on the other hand, can be created by virtually anyone and go through no formal process to identify them as acceptable resources. When using websites in your research, you should carefully consider their accuracy, authority, objectivity, currency, and usability.
Try adding "libguide" to your search to find research guides created by librarians beyond UCSD.
homelessness libguide
Use quotes to search for an exact phrase or to require a certain word.
“parking lots” "women"
Use OR (capitalized) to search for sites that may use one word instead of another. Without the OR, the search defaults to AND and finds only sites that include both terms.
statistics OR data
Use quotes and OR to search for either of multiple terms/phrases.
"homeless children" OR "homeless youth"
Use site: (that's site colon) to limit your search to a specific website or domain.
homeless site:sandiego.gov (site colon sandiego.gov will return hits only from the San Diego government website)
homeless site:.gov (site colon dot gov will return hits from any .gov domain)
Add a dash (-) before a word to exclude results that include that word; can also be used before a site to exclude results from a specific website or domain.
homeless -veterans
homeless -site:wikipedia.org
Use parentheses to combine and search for similar terms.
(children OR youth OR families) (statistics OR data)
Use filetype: to limit your search to a specific type of document.
homeless "san diego" filetype:pdf (this will only find .pdf files; other filetype choices include html, ppt, and doc; note that you can also exclude certain filetypes by using the dash before the word filetype)
Combine two or more of these for power searching.
Many libraries, museums, and other cultural institutions are continuously working to digitize texts, audio & video files, maps, images, and other material to make them widely available via the Internet.
Because copyright law may limit the ability to digitize more "recent" material, these digital collections are especially useful for historical material. They also have many government publications, which generally are not protected by copyright.
The largest of these projects are linked here; browse their collections or try a keyword search and you may be surprised by what you find!
This custom search tool will search only the government web sites of San Diego County (including cities, county, and SANDAG).
Website content can change from day to day, and definitely from year to year. The Wayback Machine is a great tool to keep in mind, because it often lets you read what was on a given website in earlier days. You may, for example, find a report from 2019 that is no longer available on the website in 2023. To start, just go to the Wayback's home page and enter a URL in the top search box and click browse history. If the page has been archived before, you'll see results like those below.
