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!

Adding quotation marks around a term forces a verbatim search. This means that Google will search for exactly that word and not synonyms or different forms of the word.

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.

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

If a website is temporarily down or a page has disappeared, the cache: operator helps you locate the last version of the page that Google crawled. Add cache: before the URL (with no space between the colon and the operator) to connect with that version.