Skip to Main Content

ENG102: First-Year Composition (Jones)

Use this guide to help with your semester long research topic for Professor Jones's ENG102 class.

How librarians use Google

For better results in Google, librarians will use various strategies which include: 

Domain searching -- Limits results according to a website's top level domain.  For example, .gov (government websites), .edu (education) and .org (organization)

  • site:domain search term(s)
  • site:.gov “computer mediated communication”
  • site:.org "text messaging"
  • site:.edu virtual reference 

Site searching -- Limits results to a particular website

  • site:url search term(s) 

  • site:www.cdc.gov zombies


Boolean operators -- 

OR - Broadens searches by only requiring either of the search terms it combines to appear in the resulting webpages.

  • search term(s) OR search term(s) 
  • censorship OR suppression OR ban

NOT - Narrows results by requiring certain terms be eliminated from the search. Instead of NOT use the minus sign (-)

  • search term(s) -unwanted term(s)
  • censorship "children's literature" -"young adults"

AND - Narrows searches by requiring any of the terms appear in the resulting webpages. Google defaults to AND so it is not needed

  • censorship school libraries

Phrase searching -- Although Google looks for all of the terms entered they will not appear as phrases unless quotations are used 

  • "search phrase"  
  • "Miranda v. Arizona"
  • "friend of the court"
  • "ex officio"

Truncation -- Broadens the search to include various word endings  

  • search term*
  • child* = child, child's, children, children's, childhood
  • censor* = censor, censors, censorship

Postcode limiter -- Limits the search to a particular zip code

  • search term(s) zipcode
  • "family farm" 85083
  • "medical marijuana" 85281

Related limiter -- Limits search results to websites that are similar in content

  • related:url 
  • related:www.pabbis.com 

Statistics -- Use the tilde (~) to find data related to search terms

  • unemployment~statistics
  • "arizona unemployment"~statistics

This handout, created by GCC Librarian Linda Schallan, offers tips and techniques for producing better Google search results.

Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-Alike License Tag

All guides are available under the CC-BY-NC-SA license.