This guide is available (CC BY-NC 3.0)
If you do reuse, please let us know so we can share any updates.
A Google Search is a powerful tool for 'surfacing' unique papers, however, it can be quite overwhelming due to the number of results, which are often heavily focused on large western NGOs. The Google 'site search' operator can be used to improve the search, and 'decolonise' google!
Google Site Searching
If you can. Use the native language google page, for instance, https://www.google.so/ for Somalia.
Search both in the Local Language and English if possible. Consider finding native speakers, as translated papers might miss key terminology.
Investigate the most common domain names for governmental or policy organisations. The Ministry for Health in Somalia is https://moh.gov.so/
Note the TLD or 'Top Level Domain'. https://moh.gov.so/ We can use this to limit the google search. .so for any website in Somalia, and .gov.so for any governmental organisation in Somalia.
Add the command site: to your search as below to limit the search to only results from a specific domain.
Google is a very powerful search if used this way, and some time spent reading the many custom operators for the Google Search is time well spent!
A good book to read on custom Google Searching is Searching the Grey Literature by Sarah Bonato
If you feel you have produced a really great 'Google Search', should you search elsewhere? Although the 'Google Algorithm' of where websites are ranked can be considered a well-guarded secret, some assumptions can possibly be made as to where websites and resources are 'Ranked' for relevance.
Well-tagged and well-produced webpages may rank higher, with significant 'keywords; (Relevance Ranking)
Popular and regularly clicked-on websites could rank higher (Popularity Ranking)
Webpages in the language of the search engine may possibly rank higher
This naturally disadvantages literature from LIC/LMIC countries.
Less of the population may be able to access computers to click on policy documents (Popularity Ranking)
Websites might be developed with a smaller team, with a reduced budget so have fewer 'findability' features. (Relevance Ranking)
Think tanks, journals and policy organisations may be less established worldwide, and are less 'clicked upon', taking time to create a strong 'Google Presence'. (Popularity Ranking)
The best solution is to also add additional Journal, Preprint, or Grey Literature Databases to your search, to ensure good coverage of your topic and to identify resources that are not indexed or hidden in Google.
Using Google Scholar is often discouraged as part of a good search strategy, after all, a University can have multiple high-quality 'Native Interfaces' (An interface where you can produce a high-quality search). Evidence does show that these databases, even the large multidisciplinary products such as Scopus and Web of Science are not 'comprehensive' when examined in a worldwide and decolonised approch.
In the paper Recalibrating the scope of scholarly publishing: A modest step in a vast decolonization process open access journals using OJS (Open Journal Systems) are poorly represented in Scopus, Web of Science, and EBSCOhost,1649, 279, and 771 respectively, while Google Scholar indexes 22,679.
The OJS publishing platform is extensively used by authors in the Global South, due to its low cost of entry, as detailed in Beyond Web of Science and Scopus there is already an open bibliodiverse world of research – We ignore it at our peril. Therefore the recommendation would be to add a Scholar search to any strategy that benefits from Decolonisation.
One of the common reasons for excluding Google Scholar is to minimise the retrieval of studies published in predatory journals and ensure the validity of the search. However the concept of a 'predatory journal' may in itself be biased and worthy of future research. A recommendation would be to consider additional steps such as critical appraisal, reviewing citations and references, or validity checking of the data rather than artificially limiting your search. (See How should we handle predatory journals in evidence synthesis? A descriptive survey-based cross-sectional study of evidence synthesis experts)