(A few handy tips to searching the web using Google)

Many of these tips apply to other search engines as well as Google.

 

Simple Searches

Enter up to 10 keywords. Any keywords over the first 10 are generally ignored.

Don't use extremely common words like and, a, or it - these will be ignored.

Don't worry about upper or lower case. Google Search is not case sensitive.

Try and be specific, use more decriptive words, names and nouns. If your search returns a mass of results that aren't a close enough match, try narrowing your search down by entering more words. google will return pages containing all your keywords.

 

Phrase searches

To get results which contain a complete phrase, enter the phrase in quotes. For example:

to find web pages with the phrase: finding some results
enter the following: "finding some results" into the search box

 

About Booleans

The default boolean beween keywords in Google (and for most other search engines) is AND. Booleans need to be entered in uppercase.

An example of AND searches:

entering the search: querying web portals
is the same as entering the search: querying AND web AND portals
which can also be entered as: querying + web + portals
this will return results containing all the words: querying, web and portals

For OR queries, the | or pipe operator can be used.

An example of OR searches:

entering the search: querying OR web OR portals
is the same as entering the search: querying | web | portals
this will return results containing either of the words: querying, web and portals

If you want you search result to exclude certain words use the - operator. For Example:

entering the search: querying web -portals
will return pages with the words querying and web, but exclude pages that also include the word portals

The parenthesis operator can be used for hierachical logic when conducting searches. The best way to explain this is using and example:

entering the search: querying (web | portals)
will return results that contain the word querying plus either the word web or the word portals.

 

Special Syntaxes

There are a number of special search prefix words appended with a colon for producing specialised search results. These are called Special Syntaxes. Here are a couple of examples:

intitle:
restricts your search to the title of the document

intext:
retricts your serch to the content text of the document

If you want to see the full list, check out Googles help pages.