Google Web Search
Document Provided Courtesy of: Kwan Yi LIB 821 Information Literacy Resources & Services Department of Curriculum and Instruction Eastern Kentucky University
Google Web Search Basics
1. Phrase Searches Enter key words search techniques. Google will find matches where the keywords appear anywhere on the page If you want Google to find you matches where the keywords appear together as a phrase, surround them with quotes, like this search techniques 2. Basic Boolean Google's Boolean default is AND, which means that if you enter query words without modifiers, Google will search for all your query words If you prefer to specify that any one word or phrase is acceptable, put an OR (in capital letter), lower case or wont work correctly. For example: enter Yahoo OR Google. A computer programming character | can work like OR (e.g. Yahoo | Google) If you want to search for a particular term along with two or more other terms, group the other terms within parentheses, like so search techniques (Yahoo OR Google) 3. Negation If you want to specify that a query item must not appear in your results, prepend a (minus sign or dash): search techniques Google. This will search the pages that contain search techniques, but not the word Google Note that the symbol must appear directly before the word or phrase that you don't want. If there's space between, as in the following query, it won't work as expected search techniques Google 4. Explicit Inclusion Google will search for all the keywords and phrases that you specify, however, there are certain words that Google will ignore because they are considered too common to be of any use in the search (e.g. a, the, of, etc.) You can force Google to take a stop word into account by prepending a + (plus) character, as in +the search techniques.
5. Synonyms The Google synonym operator, the ~ (tilde) character, prepended to any number of keywords in your query, asks Google to include not only exact matches, but also what it thinks are synonyms for each of the keywords. Searching for: ~ape turns up results for monkey, gorilla, chimpanzee, and others (both singular and plural forms) of the ape or related family, as if you'd searched for: monkey gorilla chimpanzee (Synonyms are bolded along with exact keyword matches on the results page, so they're easy to spot) 6. Number Range The number range operator, .. (two periods), looks for results that fall inside your specified numeric range (e.g. digital camera 3..5 megapixel $800..$1000) 7. Simple Searching and Feeling Lucky The I'm Feeling Lucky button is a thing of beauty. Rather than giving you a list of search results from which to choose, you're whisked away to what Google believes is the most relevant page given your search (i.e., the first result in the list). Entering washington post and clicking the I'm Feeling Lucky button takes you directly to http://www.washingtonpost.com. 8. Searching Within Your Results Help you narrow down your results to find the really relevant pages within your results pages only. Click Search within results link at the bottom of every results page. It will shows below and you can enter another keyword 9. Full-Word Wildcards The wildcard will act as a substitute for one full word. Searching for tHRee * mice, therefore, finds three blind mice, three blue mice, three green mice, etc. * is a stand-in for one word; ** signifies two words, and so on
