Topic 18: Using Advanced Search Techniques in Google Search

Advanced searching in Google is useful at those times when you want something more specific that what the basic search is giving you. It’s helpful, though to remember a few things about Google searching in general. Keep these things in mind:

•  Keep it simple. If you're looking for a particular library, just enter its name, or as much of its name as you can recall. Most queries do not require advanced operators or unusual syntax. Simple is good. 
•  Think how the page you are looking for will be written. A search engine is not a human, it is a program that matches the words you give to pages on the web. Use the words that are most likely to appear on the page.
•  Describe what you need with as few terms as possible. The goal of each word in a query is to focus it further. 
• Choose descriptive words. The more unique the word is the more likely you are to get relevant results. Nondescript words like 'document,' 'website,' 'company,' or 'info,' are usually not needed.

This being said, there are a few advanced techniques that are helpful in finding more specific information.

Phrase search ("")
By putting double quotes around a set of words, you are telling Google to consider the exact words in that exact order without any change. 

Searching for “global climate change” will focus your results.

 

Search within a specific website (site:)
Google allows you to specify that your search results must come from a given website. For example, the query [ Andrew Stuart  site:ohio ] will return pages about Andrew Stuart but only from Ohio sites You can also specify a whole class of sites, for example [ ohio university  site:.gov ] will return results only from a .gov domain and [ ohio university  site:.uk ] will return results only from British sites.

 
Fill in the blanks (*)
The *, or wildcard, is a little-known feature that can be very powerful. If you include * within a query, it tells Google to try to treat the star as a placeholder for any unknown term(s) and then find the best matches. For example, the search [ Google * ] will give you results about many of Google's products (go to next page and next page -- we have many products). The query [ Battle of * Run ] will give you stories about different battles along different streams. . Note that the * operator works only on whole words, not parts of words.

The OR operator 

Google's default behavior is to consider all the words in a search. If you want to specifically allow either one of several words, you can use the OR operator (note that you have to type 'OR' in ALL CAPS). For example, [ Cats movie OR play ] will give you results about either one of these, whereas [ Cats movie play ] (without the OR) will show pages that include both . The symbol | can be substituted for OR. (The AND operator, by the way, is the default, so it is not needed.)

 Finally, if you don’t want to remember these techniques you can use the Advances Search interface which allows you to just fill in the blanks.

 

Your task for Tech Tag is to try some of these searches on a topic of your choice and see what you come up with.