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Search Strategies for the Internet

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Selected Google Commands

Top Search Tips (HTML)
(PDF version)

Comparison Table PDF (40 KB)
HTML Version

Business Key Starting
Points & Search Tools

(PDF 30 KB)

Links to Search Tools

Purchase

Get Arcobat Reader

IV Fact Sheets

Google

http://www.google.com/
http://www.google.co.uk/

Key features

  • automatic stemming of terms and searching for variations of your search terms
  • synonym search
  • numeric range search
  • separate services covering images, blogs, peer-reviewed articles (Google Scholar), digitised books (Google Books)
  • usenet archive and Google Groups offering a 20 year archive of discussions
  • Google Toolbar for your browser giving access to many of the Google search options straight from your browser

Search options

Default search type Searches for all of your words
Case sensitive? No
Wildcard/Truncation Automatically stems and looks for variations of your search terms.
Phrases and proximity "……" For example "building society"
Asterisk * can be used to stand in for one or more words within a phrase.
Mandatory search terms Plus sign (+) before stop words such as "the", "of", "in" for example "accidents +in +the home".
Also use the plus sign before a word to stop Google automatically stemming it.
Exclude pages containing a term Minus sign (-) before the word, for example
branson -balloon
Word in the URL inurl: for pages with the term in their URL, for example inurl:chocolate
allinurl: for pages that contain all of your terms in the URL
Word in title intitle: for pages that contain the adjacent word in the title, for example intitle:eiger
allintitle:
for pages that contain all of your terms in the title
Linked pages link: for pages that link to a known URL, for example
link:www.rba.co.uk
Similar pages related: for related or similar pages, for example related:www.rba.co.uk
Limit by domain/site site: for results from a particular type of domain, for example site:.ac.uk for academic sites in the UK or to search one specific web site, for example site:statistics.gov.uk
File type filetype: to specify a non-html document, for example filetype:pdf

File types supported include PDF, Word, RTF, Excel, PowerPoint, Postscript, WordPerfect

Cached copy available Yes. Can be viewed from the results list. To search for a particular cached page use cache: for example cache:www.rba.co.uk
Boolean search OR - must be in capital letters
Specify language Yes - in Advanced Search
Limit by country Country versions of Google.
Limit by date Yes - in Advanced Search
Unique features Numeric range search. Syntax is 1st number..2nd number units of measurement, for example 1..5 kg

Synonym search - precede your term with a tilde (~) to automatically search for synonyms

define: searches for definitions of terms and abbreviations in online dictionaries and glossaries

PDF PDF Version (23 KB)


This page was last updated on 13 August, 2006 Copyright © 2006 Karen Blakeman