Outlines basic search techniques and examples.

Describes symbols used for phrase searching, fill-in-the-blank searching, excluding terms, and searching a specific site.

Describes how to narrow and adjust your search results. It also includes the "Verbatim" limiter, which is helpful when Google returns results with unwanted synonyms for your search terms, or when Google does not include all of your search terms in your results.

2022 article from Google on using quotation marks to refine searches.

A student located a PowerPoint presentation online but didn't note the citation information. She remembered it was a PowerPoint presentation on diabetes in the elderly. Specifying the file type in the search turned up the item quickly. You can also do this for doc, pdf, and other formats.

Using site:gov easily narrowed a search from .com and .org websites to only .gov websites with the needed data.

This is a basic search for information on caffeine and health. Notice that the results come from a variety of sources and are of varying quality. There are also far too many results to wade through!

Using the site: limiter, we can limit results to only .gov web sites. This can also be used for .edu sites, and can even limit to a specific directory on a page, such as site:www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed.

The OR operator looks for specified synonyms. This search for tea and health looks for either green tea or black tea.

The * before our search term allows us to search for a broader variety of teas. In our results list, we might see green or black, but also rooibos or pu erh.

Using the minus sign before a term in your search eliminates the term from your search results. In this case, the results include pages discussing caffeine and health, but that do not include discussion of tea.

This search looks for pages that contain the exact phrase decaffeinated coffee, and ensures that the two terms appear somewhere together - not in unrelated parts of the page.

This search looks for pages with information on caffeine, but with the word "health" in the title of the page. Results may also include caffeine in the title (thanks to Google's search algorithms that privilege pages with search terms in the title), but all results will have health in the title.

Using numbers separated by two periods searches for pages that include numbers between those specified. This search looks for pu erh tea that costs between $10 and $20 a package.

Searches for the word tea within five words of the word health.

Discontinued June 2013. Using the tilde before one of our terms broadened searches and brought back results for terms similar to our search terms. In this example, ~caffeine returned results for coffee as well. Because Google is determining related terms, we had less control over the results than we would if we use the OR operator.

Discontinued October 2011. The + operator indicated to Google that you definitely wanted the particular term that followed the + in your search results.

Discontinued. Previously would include pages linking to the Mayo Clinic page on caffeine and health.

Discontinued. The related: operator previously searched for similar pages. This search previously would return pages related to the Mayo Clinic page above.