Tips and tricks to make searching with Google quicker and more effective.

1. Tips and tricks for using Google

2. How does Google search?

3. 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

4. How does Google search?

5. Results
£
£

6. Phrasing your search queries

7. Tips for phrasing
1. Start simply
William
Shakespeare

8. Tips for phrasing
2. Add relevant words
William
Shakespeare Life

9. Tips for phrasing
3. Think within the field
The Bard of Avon

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

11. Tips for phrasing
*
Common words are ignored:
The
a
for
to
and
all
in
some it’s
that

12. Tips for phrasing
…most of the time
whothe

13. Google is intelligent

14. Don’t worry about
1. Spelling
– autocorrects
2. Punctuation
– ignores @#%^*()=[]
3. Capitalisation
– the new internationalist = The New Internationalist

15. 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 ]

16. Verbatim Search

17. Using special characters

18. 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.

19. Minus Sign
Excludes words from your search
e.g.
The Great Gatsby -film

20. Tilde
Searches for synonyms
e.g.
~food facts
includes results for “nutrition facts”

21. 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.

22. Phrasing your search queries

23. 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

24. 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

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

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

27. Further information

28. 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