by Logan Sanderson

Created on: July 15, 2009

Have you ever been conducting research for an essay or article, but were frustrated that you couldn't find the right sources from your searches? Or have you ever been searching for a specific topic, and noticed that certain terms seem to be plaguing your search results?

You may have heard that learning how to search Google effectively takes time and effort. Though learning to efficiently search Google does take some practice, there are actually several tips that you can apply to your next search that will significantly improve results.

1) Use wildcards to search specific domains.

In my writing classes, much of our focus has been directed towards distinguishing between using 'good' and 'bad' sources in our essays. Most of the 'good' sources for our topics come from University and Government websites. Since most university website domains end in ".edu" and almost all government websites are under the ".gov" domain, we can use a simple search command to tell Google to search only university and government websites.

Instead of simply searching for "accessibility" in Google, try entering:

site:*.gov | site:*.edu accessibility

Google will only present websites that end in ".gov" and ".edu". This can greatly help you filter out websites that you can't use for research, such as Wikipedia, blogs, and opinion websites. While wikis and blogs are useful if you are simply researching something yourself, alone they are not suitable sources for research papers.

2) Remove absolute terms.

We've been told not to use generalizations and vague terms in our writing, but for certain Internet searches, that is exactly what we want. I've noticed that sometimes numbers and prepositions can get in the way of finding useful results in search engines. The reason for this is that there are so many different ways to write one idea. For example, if you are searching for an article about how to increase your website's ranking in Google, one might think of searching for:

"10 ways to increase your website's Google ranking".

While you may find articles using this method, you might not find the 'best' article for the topic at hand. An optimized version of this search might look like this:

"~ways ~increase search engine ~ranking".

Notice that we've removed the preposition "to", the absolute number "10", and the proper noun "Google". Notice that we've also used the "~" operator, which tells Google to also try synonyms of the following word.

Now,

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