Skip to Main Content
10 ways to search Google like an expert
- Get specific with quotes ("")
Google looks for all of the words you enter. To maintain the integrity of your sentence and eliminate many false positive results use quotations marks.
- Search within a specific website (site:)
You are able to limit your search to within a particular website, or web domain. A search for .gov information would look as follows: literacy statistics site:.gov.
- Subtract terms you want to exclude (-)
As though you are using a calculator you are able to subtract terms you do not want to appear in your results: football -soccer.
- Add terms you want to include ("")
An opposite approach is make sure that a word appears in all of your results. To do so, simply place quotation marks around the single term ("hydrogen").
- Use the Advanced Search Page
There is no need to rely on the basic options. Get advanced!
- The OR operator
Using the OR operator between words allows you to search for synonymns and spelling variations. The following example will search for "worldcup football OR soccer."
- Specific Document Types:
You can limit your results to certain file types. These file types include PDF, PowerPoint, Word Document and Excel Spreadsheet. Here is a list of file types indexable by Google.
- Set your preferences:
Setting your search preferences will result in saving you time. Two quick methods are to increase the number of hits that you retrieve during a search (i.e., 100), and to turn on query suggestions.
- intitle/allintitle, inurl, allinurl
Get specific by searching within a title, or url.
- Find similar words
Finally, if you would like Google to consider synonyms, you can search for similar word by using the tilde (~). If you would like your results to contain similar words or synonyms use the "~" in front of the word. Example: "internet marketing" ~professional
© 2022 New York Institute of Technology
