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Advanced Search Strategies

Published on Feb 02, 2016

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Advanced Search Strategies

How to "Google to the Max"

Keywords
Keywords are the most important words in your search question.

Using NOT (-)

To eliminate certain words from your search use the minus sign.
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For example, if I search vikings I will get results for the Minnesota Vikings. But if I use vikings -minnesota -football it will eliminate results with football and Minnesota.

Using OR

To look for similar words

For example, I'm looking for info about cars. I can search cars OR auto OR automobile. I will get results that include any of those three words.

Using quotation marks

To look for phrases
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When you type a search into Google, it looks for those words on a page. It doesn't look for them in that order. So when I type black plague it looks for both those words anywhere on the page.

But I don't really want those two words anywhere on that page, I want those two words together as a search term. This is phrase searching.

If I use quotation marks around my phrase "black plague" it will look for pages that contain those words as a phrase and one search term.

Site:

To limit results to certain domains

Web Domains

  • .com
  • .edu
  • .org
  • .gov
  • .net
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In academic research, we want to limit our result to credible websites. Using the site search limits our results to certain domains.

For example, searching "black plague" site:edu will only return results about the black plague from educational sites.

This is a quick way to eliminate crappy websites.

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Looking for root words

Sometimes we want to look for any form of a word. We can use the asterik * to look for a root word.

So why does this matter?

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Unless you have unlimited time, you need to find what you need to know quickly. These tips can cut through the fat and get right to the meat of your questions.

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For example, if I search econ* it will turn results which include the following:
economy
economist
economical