Tips and tricks for using Google

How does Google search?

Google’s Aim “The perfect search engine would understand exactly what you mean and give you back exactly what you want.”

Larry Page, Co-founder & CEO

How does Google search?

How does Google search?

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Results

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Phrasing your search queries

Tips for phrasing 1. Start simply

William Shakespeare

Tips for phrasing 2. Add relevant words

William Shakespeare Life

Tips for phrasing 3. Think within the field

The Bard of Avon

Tips for phrasing 4. Only use important words* Not ideal: When will the sun come up in London tomorrow? Ideal: sunrise London

Tips for phrasing * Common words are ignored:

The for and to a that some it’s all in

Tips for phrasing …most of the time the who

Google is intelligent

Don’t worry about

1. Spelling

– autocorrects

2. Punctuation

– ignores @#%^*()=[]\

3. Capitalisation

– the new internationalist = The New Internationalist

When you search Google… • • • • • suggests spelling corrections and alternative spellings personalizes your search by using information such as sites you’ve visited before includes synonyms of your search terms to find related results find results that match similar terms to those in your query searches for words with the same stem, like "running" when you search for [ run ]

Verbatim Search

Using special characters

Quotation Marks Search for an exact phrase in an exact order.

e.g. “to be or not to be” Warning: you may exclude relevant results.

e.g. a search for "Alexander Bell" will miss pages that refer to Alexander G. Bell.

Minus Sign Excludes words from your search e.g.

The Great Gatsby -film

Tilde Searches for synonyms e.g.

~food facts includes results for “nutrition facts”

2 full stops Searches for a specific number range e.g.

prime ministers 1900 .. 2000 N.B. Make sure you put a space either side of the full stops.

Phrasing your search queries

Search within a site

site:

allows you to get your search from a specific site or type of site (.gov, .edu).

e.g. unemployment site:gov would only give you search results from .gov websites

Search related

related:

allows you to find pages that have similar content to a site e.g. related:www.bbc.co.uk

would give you other news and media agencies

Define

define:

gives you a definition of a word e.g. define: irony

Filetypes

filetype:

searches for specific filetypes e.g. the war of the roses filetype:ppt

Further information

Links Inside Search Help

http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py

?hl=en&safe=vss&answer=134479

All Tips and Tricks

http://www.google.com/insidesearch/tipstricks/all.ht

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