IN GENERAL   

10 words maximum

Never use more than 10 words in a search. Avoid making one-word queries.

Word proximity

Words close together in your search will favour documents with those words close together in the text.

Word order

Type your words in the order that you think they would appear in the documents you are looking for.

Case sensitivity

There is no need to capitalise.

Punctuation

Google ignores any punctuation.

ADVANCED SEARCHES

Boolean operators:

• AND (with all the words)

• OR (with at least one of the words)

• NOT (without the words)

Implied as default: two words next to each other will read as an  AND.

Use OR (capital letters!) for synonyms and spelling variations.

Use “ – “ for NOT.

Phrase searching
(with the exact phrase)

For a proper name or phrase enclose search terms in quotation marks.

Language

It is possible to limit to a selected language

File format
    (doc, pdf, ptt, xls, rtf)

Specify the format of your results, e.g. filetype:doc

Date

Limit to the past 3, 6 or 12 months

Numeric Range
”..“

When you want pages containing numbers in a specified range e.g. 1995..2005

Occurences:

• Anywhere in the page
   

• Intitle / Allintitle

• Intext / Allintext
   

• Inurl / Allinurl

Default

All query words must appear in the title. Useful to search the homepage of an institution/organisation; or to ensure the pages will be primarily on the subject of the query words. Intitle: search for a word or phrase within the page title. Allintitle: search for multiple words within the page title.
 

All query words must appear in the text of the page

All query words must appear in the URL

Link

Who links to you? Link:URL (http:// not necessary)

Domain

Search only a specific website (e.g., www.sun.ac.za) or domain (e.g., .org) or exclude that site or domain completely from your search. (site:.org) For more country and other domains:  http://www.anzwers.com.au/FAQ/faq-domains.html

Ignore “ - “

Precede each term you do not want to appear in any result with a “-“ sign.

 “ + “

• Use in front of stop words. Google otherwise ignore topwords like “where” of “how”, single digits or single letters.

• Google uses stemming to search on the stem or root of a word that can have multiple endings, for eg “psychology” will also return pages with “psychologist(s)”,  “psychological” etc.  Use a + directly in front of a word to search for the word exactly.

OTHER USEFUL TIPS

Phrase

Put quotes around phrases eg. “global warming”

Synonyms
“ ~ ”

Find synonyms by preceding the term with a ~, which is known as the tilde or synonym operator.

One word, two words or hyphenated

If in doubt search for it with a hyphen eg. “long-term”. In this instance Google will search all variations.

Definitions

Use define:word   Google uses Web-based dictionaries

Calculator

Use the search box to make calculations and conversions. Eg. plus=+; minus=-; multiplications=*; divisions=/, etc. See http://www.google.com/help/calculator.html

Wildcard: incomplete phrase “*”

Use an *, known as a wildcard, to match any word in a phrase (enclosed in quotes). Eg. “eternal sunshine of the * mind”

OTHER GOOGLE SEARCHES

Images

Images, maps, graphics, photos, designs or drawings.

Groups

Search for groups. Is a comprehensive archive of human conversation, dating back to 1981.

News

Presents information culled from thousands of news sources worldwide. Can set up Google News Alerts to get email when news articles on topics of interest to you appear on the web.

Froogle

Froogle is a searchable and browsable shopping index.

I’m Feeling Lucky

Instead of showing you a list of pages, Google sends you immediately to the result that may be most relevant to your query.

  Google Scholar