It's the first of November and that means that thousands of people around the world are embarking on one of the most grueling and challenging quests known to man. Nanorimo, whereby the end of the month, the aim is to have completed a 50,000 word novel. Achieving this gives the winners an amazing sense of accomplishment also I've been told. As you write, you'll probably need to do some research to make your plots, characters, settings, and overall narrative believable and grounded. Or if you're like me, you've left everything to the last minute and don't have a clue about what you're going to write. Also, if you're like me, a basic web search can too easily devolve into an hour's long rabbit hole of wiki-pedior articles, YouTube videos, Tumblr posts, and subreddits. I'm Luke from LibSaurus and here are five quick and dirty searching tips to help stop wasting your precious writing time during Nanorimo. Number one, expand your search terms. We're talking about synonyms here. Whether you're using Google Bing or a library catalog, if you're not having much success finding what you want, try using slightly different terms. You can use the sorai, obviously, dictionaries and encyclopedia, including wiki-pedior. Speaking of wiki-pedior. Number two, use wiki-pedior better. Each article on wiki-pedior should have in-text citations and a corresponding reference list. If the article you're reading doesn't have those things, it's probably not a great source of information and you should back away slowly before looking elsewhere. When I'm looking for accurate information on wiki-pedior, I'll read the article, then see if I can get more info from the reference list. The references in the reference list are often openly accessible to anyone on the web, so you can do your own fact checking and in-depth research. Number three, include top level domains in your Google search. If you're getting results from Google that aren't all that reliable, try the site command. Just enter site colon dot g o v to restrict your search to only sites that are from the US government or site colon dot o rg to get stuff from non-government organizations or site dot edu or site dot ac to get stuff from education and academic institutions. It also works with country codes, site dot uk searches only sites in the United Kingdom, for example. You might need to have a play around with the site command to get them the most from it, but it's very useful and will probably save you some time down the track. Number four, refine your search with filters and limits. While we're talking about restricting our Google searches, Google offers some great ways to limit or filter your results in the search tools options. Most search engines and library catalogs are going to have something like this, so have a look around to see if you can limit your results to specific years or filter out irrelevant information. Number five, be specific with quotation marks. If you type a phrase into a search engine, chances are it'll look for results where those words appear anywhere in the documents. Putting quotation marks around your search phrase means that the search engine will look only for that specific phrase exactly how you typed it. For more search tips or general library information literacy or research skills info, check out the libsours Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages, links in the description. I've been Luke from libsours. Thanks for watching.