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Google Scholar is a search engine to broadly search scholarly literature, including articles, theses, books, and abstracts from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and more. By changing your settings, you can connect to articles and ebooks available from the University of Waterloo Library without having to search individual databases.
Google Scholar searches LOTS of material, searches full-text, lets you use natural language (automatically searches many synonyms, corrects spelling errors), lets you know how many times a source has been cited by others, and lets you resort your results. Be aware the search is not comprehensive - it doesn’t search everything, including all of our databases (i.e. Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals), and not always the most recent material.
Both Google and Google Scholar have advanced search options. Check this list of of all 42 advanced search operators to optimize your searches.
Here is a list some of my favourite advanced search operators:
Here are instructions on how to update your Google Scholar settings to link to the University of Waterloo's collections: