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Google is one of the most popular and powerful search engines, and it is remarkably easy to use. Yet, with so many millions of webpages available, it can be difficult to find the best results. You might be looking for an obscure piece of information, trying to find an academically respectable source, or simply attempting to filter out the best results from the background noise. By learning to use the optimum search syntax, together with the best search terms, you can greatly improve the quality of the results returned. You can even target your search at particular areas of the Web, or search specific types of resource.
Suppose, for example, you are looking for pages related to search engine optimization (SEO). Entering search engine optimization as three separate keywords will return something like 35 million results which would take you a while to check through! Some experimentation can make this a little more manageable, as shown below:
search engine optimization: 34,700,000 results "search engine optimization": 23,000,000 results "search engine optimization" tips: 1,760,000 results "search engine optimization tips": 196,000 results
We'll see some further ways to reduce this total shortly, while at the same time increasing the relevance of the results.
optimization is often referred to as SEO, a catch-all search might be "search engine optimization tips" OR "seo tips".
intitle:keyword: search for a single keyword (or quoted expression) in the title allintitle:keyword1 keyword2 ...: search for a list of keywords (and/or quoted expressions) in the title inurl:keyword: search for a single keyword (or quoted expression) in the URL allinurl:keyword1 keyword2 ...: search for a list of keywords (and/or quoted expressions) in the URL
To look at our SEO example for one last time, a search for intitle:"search engine optimization tips" returned 9,380 results when testedwhich is a considerable improvement on the 35 million results produced by our first attempt!
produced by Google themselves, an appropriate search term would be site:google.com "search help". You can make the search as targeted or broad as you choose by omitting portions of the URL, starting at the left end. By omitting the hostname (www for example), as shown with Google in the previous example, the search will target all servers in the specified domain. It can sometimes be useful to omit the first part of the domain name, as this will cause the search to be targeted at similar categories of website. Suppose, for example, that you are looking for advice on the Harvard referencing system to enable you to complete an academic report. A search for site:edu "harvard referencing" guidelines would return matching documents from universities. (Use site:ac.uk "harvard referencing" guidelines to find UK-based equivalents.) Google offers a facility to search a named university based on this techniquesee the Google University Search page for more details.
Figure 1. Getting a definition of a search term. These hyperlinks actually provide definitions of the search terms, and are provided by answers.com. An alternative to this approach is to explicitly ask for a definition when performing the search. To do this type the command define:, followed immediately by the keyword or quoted expression to be defined. For example, to find a definition of the term entropy, the syntax define:entropy would be used.
Summary
By adopting the techniques explained here you will be able to:
reduce the number of returned results, while increasing the relevance of those results; restrict a search to a particular area of the Internet; focus on particular types of result, including academic resources and books.
While this is obviously relevant for academic research, the methods shown are also recommended for anyone trying to use Google to find the best quality information