1. Type salem witch in the Google search box.

    2. Note that Google automatically ANDS your terms together so that only those pages with all terms will be retrieved.

  2. Click on Search.

    3. How many results did you find?

    You probably found well over 800,000 results. Note that Google ranks your results using factors such as:

    1. word occurence
    2. word location
    3. page popularity

    Keep in mind that sometimes the best results might not be at the very top.

    Look at the urls of your search results

    You will see various domain names such as


    Educational sites are often good resources, but you still need to evaluate them. Does the site credit its sources properly? Is this a department site or a personal page hosted by the school?

  3. Click on one of the commercial sites with a .com domain to examine it.

    4. You will see that many of the .com sites are tourism sites for Salem, Massachusetts. They provide some information on the trials, but they would not be good resources for a research paper.

  4. Click on the hit for Wikipedia which should appear near the top of your search results.

    5. Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia that anyone is allowed to edit. Like other general encyclopedias, it can be a good place to gather background information on your topic and find other sources by checking out the references. It is not typically a resource that you would include on your bibliography. What you read one day might be changed the next day.

    With that said, it can be a good resource on current popular culture topics that are not well covered in the published literature.

  5. Go back to the search results, and click on the hit for Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive.

    6. By reading the project information, you will see that this is an electronic collection of primary source materials related to the Salem Witch Trials, and the project is affiliated with the University of Virginia. In-depth research requires using primary source materials, and this would be a valuable resource.

Google also offers a variety of Advanced Search features that are worth checking out.

Here are some quick tips: