There are a lot of places to search for information but before you do it is helpful to have a clear idea of what you are looking for and why you are looking for it. Librarians have always done this by using something called a reference interview where they ask a lot of questions of the person searching for information to help figure out what the person actually needs information about. Most of the searching you do, does not involve a librarian so you need to start by figuring out the keywords that you need to use in your searching so you can get the most relevant results in the least amount of time and frustration.
Especially if you are searching for information about a topic you are not extremely familiar with it can be beneficial to start by looking at a general source of information about your topic such as an encyclopedia. I generally use Wikipedia because it is easy to access. However, MSU faculty, students and staff have access to the electronic version of Encyclopedia Britannica through the library's website. Looking at one of these general sources can not only familiarize you with your topic but it will also help you figure out common terminology used within the discipline of your topic and can help you focus on different aspects of your topic. A more entertaining way to help you identify common terms is to create a word cloud using a program like Wordle (now discontinued but you can find other potential world cloud programs here.) For my word cloud I included the entire Wikipedia article on libraries. The larger words were mentioned more in the article than the smaller words. From it I can easily see that words such as books, information, collection, and materials are important. A thesaurus can also help you find terms that mean roughly the same thing as the terms you have already identified as important.
After familiarizing yourself with a topic, it is time to start narrowing down what aspects of the topic you would like to research. If you are looking at something about obesity, that is a very general topic. There are so many ways to think about obesity. How is obesity determined and how did the current system for determination get in place? You could also look at obesity in specific populations, like children. Then think about what you want to know about obesity in children. In the example I have created the question: What are the causes of childhood obesity?
Once you have formulated a research question. You need to think about the keywords in your question that will be important to include in our search. For the question "What are the causes of childhood obesity?" The words: what, are, the, and of are not important to my search and should not be included. However, causes, childhood, and obesity, will hopefully give me a specific enough search so I get a lot of great results.
If you have problems searching you generally either end up with too many or too few results and you need to go back and refine your search by either broadening or narrowing your search. You may not find a book specifically about the Battle of Cold Harbor but you will find books about the Civil War and they were probably contain information on the Battle of Cold Harbor. On the other side, if you start your search with a general term such as education you'll find a lot of results but year few will actually be relevant.
No results can also be extremely frustrating, the first thing you need to do there is to double-check your spelling. We have gotten really used to Google correcting our spelling mistakes for us but not every search engine or database does this for us. If you spelled everything right and get no results you need to look for other terms that mean the same thing, as you may not be using the language that the people who write the information you are looking for are using.
The last type of common information problem is no relevant results. If that happens you need to refocus on what information you are trying to find and think about why the search terms you are using are not helpful. Sometimes getting someone else’s thoughts on the subject can help you with this. I find that just stating my problem out-loud ends up letting me rethink what I am doing or the person you are talking to could have different ideas as they are looking at it with a different frame of mind.
I hope this information helps you create better search terms and find more relevant information but if you have any issues, contact the library so we can help. With all of the information sources around us, we are in a constant state of information overload. Let a librarian help you navigate. We can help you save time and frustration!