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?
Results
£
£
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
a
and
for
that
some
to
in
all
it’s
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
ml