More Google Tips / PDFs

You may have noticed that most of the links on this blog link to pages which don't look or feel quite like normal web pages; instead, they look like digital versions of a printed document, with individual pages that you can flick through. In fact, most of these documents are known as PDF files, and PDFs seem to have become the accepted standard for webmasters when they are putting official reports or research online.

If you use Google for your online searches (and I know most of you do...), there is a way that you can narrow your search so that your results only contain PDF documents. This means that you will be much more likely to find suitable academic items and not have to wade through pages of irrelevant material. To do this, you simply have to add the command filetype:pdf to the end of your search. Eg if you were looking for material on child poverty, just enter the following...

child poverty filetype:pdf

and voila! You should now be looking at a page of results with a number of links containing good research material. Let me know if it works for you.