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Google is more than the fun doodles and single search box we see on the main page - it offers much more under that top layer. This guide is an introduction to some of those advanced features, and can help you discover tips and tricks you can use in your own research.
Please keep in mind that Google customizes search results based on your previous searches, changes its interface, and also tweaks its search algorithms and search commands periodically. If you try something and it doesn't work as intended, please consult Google's help pages for the most up-to-date information.
Official Google Search Tips: Basic and Advanced
- Basic Search Help - Web Search Help
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Outlines basic search techniques and examples. - Refine Web Searches
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Describes symbols used for phrase searching, fill-in-the-blank searching, excluding terms, and searching a specific site. - Filter Your Search Results
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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. - How we're improving search results when you use quotes (The Keyword)
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2022 article from Google on using quotation marks to refine searches.
Unofficial Search Tips
- Internet Search Tips (gwern.net)"A description of advanced tips and tricks for effective Internet research of papers/books, with real-world examples."
Real Life Search Examples
Below are two real-life examples where using Google Advanced Search techniques helped researchers find the information they were interested in.
- diabetes in the elderly filetype:pptA 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.
- historical climate data site:govUsing site:gov easily narrowed a search from .com and .org websites to only .gov websites with the needed data.
Additional Search Techniques
- caffeine healthThis 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!
- "caffeine" healthAdding 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.
- caffeine health site:govUsing 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.
- tea health green OR blackThe OR operator looks for specified synonyms. This search for tea and health looks for either green tea or black tea.
- * tea healthThe * 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.
- caffeine health -teaUsing 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.
- "decaffeinated coffee" healthThis 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.
- caffeine intitle:healthThis 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.
- pu erh tea 11..20Using numbers separated by two periods searches for pages that include numbers between those specified.
- tea AROUND(5) healthSearches for the word tea within five words of the word health.
- cache:https://www.nccih.nih.gov/health/green-teaIf 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.