ADVANCED SEARCH TECHNIQUES FOR GOOGLE

Week 13

Google Advanced Search

Review Chap 3; in particular p. 46-50 in the textbook.

See link for advanced search operators we will cover below:https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en&ref_topic=3081620

Differences in Web Searching Versus Database Searching

Web Searches Can draw up many more records than a database

searchAre mainly keyword searches:

A search for drug abuse will search entire web sites and pages for the term:

Google Search

over 2 million results

Google helps searchers out by placing more relevant sites at the top [like .gov and .edu sites]

Google searches by keywords in the entire website text

Compare to Database Search

ProQuest keyword search –here we searched all fields

Keywords from citations/abstracts [NOT full text of article

Other ways to narrow a search

Some Important Basic Search Tips for Google

Add relevant words if your search doesn’t bring up results you want:  First try: [ puppy ] 

    More precise: [ puppy training ]     Even more precise: [ dalmatian puppy training class ] 

Use only the important words rather than a full sentence or question: Not ideal: [ country where bats are an omen of good

luck ]     Better: [ bats good luck ] 

Basics of Searching Google

Stop Words: Common words like "the," "a," and "for," are usually ignored

However, they might not be if they're integral to your search phrase. For example, the word "the" differentiates a search for  [ the who ] (likely referring to the band) and [ WHO ] (likely referring to the World Health

Organization).

Boolean Operators in Google

AND is implied

Drug AND abuse

AND searching in Google

AND is implied between words in Google

This means you do not have to add the operator

OR

OR must be added

Drug ORabuse

OR searching in Google

OR is not added automatically

It’s greatly expanded our search and probably added unrelated or too broad sites

Using OR with synonyms

Sites with both terms

Synonym searching is a powerful way to draw up similar terms in a search

AND between terms by default Add OR to link synonyms

NOT

NOT is not often used in Google searches (other search limiters work better in Google, as we will see later)

Drug NOTabuse

Google - Other Advanced Search Techniques

Google features several other search limiters, some of which are similar to databases [like ProQuest or Ebsco] and some of which are not

Google – Some Common Search Limiters

Phrase Searching “ “Exclude a term -Link two terms _ [underscore]Site, domain and related search :Fill in the Blank Query *Search for non-HTML files filetype:See Google Operators for example searcheshttps://support.google.com/websearch/answer/136861

Phrase Searching

This allows searches for specific phrases within websites and pages

Phrase Searching is a useful technique to search the texts of entire websites for a phrase.

Exclude a Term

Use of – require exclusion of term

NO space between symbol and word

Link two terms underscore

Use of _ links two terms. This finds quicksort or terms linked by underscore

This finds quicksort or terms linked by underscore

This is a new Google operator, and really seems to replicate searching by Boolean operator AND! We will see how long this one sticks around.

Google Operators Change Every so Often

As an aside, advanced operators change periodically with Google. Two that recently were ‘deprecated’ [discontinued] are + [required term in search] and tilde~ [found related words in a search.

According to Google:The + was discontinued in 2011 [possibly due to

Google+ and confusion with new newwork] http://webscripts.softpedia.com/blog/Google-Search-Drops-the-Operator-May-Be-

Linked-to-Google-229458.shtml

The tilde was discontinued due to decreasing use: http://searchengineland.com/google-drops-another-search-operator-tilde-for-

synonyms-164403

Site Search

Site search:Olympic site:.gov

Use : for site search

NO space between : and .gov

Domain Search

Domain search: Olympics: nytimes.com

Use : for domain search

Related search

Related search: related:newsweek.com

Use : for related search

"fill in the blank" query * query

Use * to replace words in a query [* replaces word ‘penny’ in search]

This is a useful search not well-known to beginning users – good for finding facts and historical dates, names etc.

Search for filetype:Example search:global warming filetype:pdf

Non-HTML file types:http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35287

Some examples of documents to search on Google are .pdf, PowerPoint, video, Microsoft Office files, Flash .swf files

Google - Advanced Search Techniques

Links for Search Techniques [refer to the below for the following slides]:\

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en&ref_topic=3081620 [Google support for search techniques]

http://www.internetseer.com/services/article.xtp?id=8472 [another page for Google Search Techniques] http://www.amplify-interactive.com/blog/search-engines/advan

ced-google-search-tips/ [good summary of search techniques]