by Brandon Whitton

Created on: January 12, 2008

Google the world's most popular search engine is a powerful tool that even a beginner can quickly become proficient with. The following tips will help you to easily find the information that you are searching for.

THE BASICS

1) Google searches are not case sensitive. Searching for 'sex pistols' and 'SEX PISTOLS' will both return the same results. So leave the capitalization for that English paper you were working on.

2) The "+" and "-" operators are used to force Google to include or discard terms from search results. For example, the following search - 'rolling +stones -pins' will return results that contain both 'rolling' and 'stones' whilst discarding results containing the word 'pins'.

3) Google searches exclude common words like "I", "the", "and" etc. This is done to speed up the search. Google can be forced to include these words in a search if you put a "+" in front of them. They will also be included if they are used within a phrase surrounded by quotation marks.

4) To search for an exact phrase you need to enclose the phrase in quotation marks. For example: "To be or not to be". This search will only return pages that contain this exact phrase. If you entered the terms without the quotation marks your search would return both pages that contained the exact phrase and pages that contain some or all of these words individually. Obviously the pages that contain the words individually are unlikely to be particularly relevant to your search. Using quotation marks will help restrict the search results to those that are most relevant.

5) Use multiple search terms to ensure you find exactly what you are looking for. If you are searching for the Onion news site and you just search with 'onion' Google will return 29,600,000 results. Most of these won't be relevant. By adding 'news' as an additional search term Google returns 961,000 results. Searching with multiple terms helps to narrow down the number of sites that may be relevant to your search. This makes it far easier for you to find what you are after.

6) To find pages that contain either of two search terms you should use an uppercase "OR" between the two search terms: eg 'seagull OR eagle'

ADVANCED TIPS

1) Google allows wildcard searches with the "*" operator. Unfortunately, you are not able to search on partial words: eg 'bra*'. At present Google wildcard searches only work for complete words or phrases. For example: 'famous * player' will return results for:

-'famous tennis player'
-'famous Latvian soccer player'
-'famous

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