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 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.
NOT - Narrows results by requiring certain terms be eliminated from the search. Instead of NOT use the minus sign (-)
AND - Narrows searches by requiring any of the terms appear in the resulting webpages. Google defaults to AND so it is not needed
Phrase searching -- Although Google looks for all of the terms entered they will not appear as phrases unless quotations are used
Truncation -- Broadens the search to include various word endings
Postcode limiter -- Limits the search to a particular zip code
Related limiter -- Limits search results to websites that are similar in content
Statistics -- Use the tilde (~) to find data related to search terms
This handout, created by GCC Librarian Linda Schallan, offers tips and techniques for producing better Google search results.
All guides are available under the CC-BY-NC-SA license.