Power up your Google search using these advanced search functions to find the information you’re looking for.
1. Phrase searching
“ ” are used when you specifically want to find search results that precisely match the exact word or phrase enclosed within them. Example: “measles eradication through vaccination”
* will add in up to 5 words in place of the asterisk. Example: three * mice This is good if you don’t know the exact phrase you are after.
Parentheses don’t matter: Many people want to conduct searches like [ (A B ) OR (C D) ], but Google overlooks the parentheses, resulting in the search being simplified to [ A B OR C D ]. Consequently, this translates to just A, either B or C, and D being taken into account.
2. Boolean Operators – ensure that you use Uppercase.
AND: Narrows results by combining terms. Example: “obesity AND prevention strategies UK.”
OR: Broadens searches by including alternative terms. Example: “mental health OR psychological well-being UK.”
3. Refine your search
Exclude a word use the – symbol. the minus sign must be put immediately before a word and should be preceded by a space. Example: vaccine -Covid will exclude results with both vaccine and Covid.
term 1 AROUND n term 2 can be used to limit results to those documents where term1 appears within a certain number of words of term2. Example: search AROUND 3 vaccine but be aware that this doesn’t preserve order of the words.
filetype: allows you to find specific filetypes using the file suffix. Example: filetype:PDF, filetype:pptx NB. you can no longer search for MP3 or CSV files this way.
site: this will restrict your search results to the site or domain you specify. Example: site:ac.uk
4. Date searching
before: will let you find results that were published before a certain date. Example: long Covid before:2022-1-1
after: will let you find results that were published after a certain date. Example: Covid symptoms after:2023-6-1
define Provides definitions sourced from web pages for the specified term, helps in locating meanings of words, phrases, and acronyms.
5. In title or in url
allinurl: will find the results containing the word in the url. Example: allinurl: pension gov.uk
allintitle: will return results containing all the query terms you specify in the title. Example: allintitle: measles adults will return only documents that contain the words “measles” and “adults” in the title of the page.
6. Numerical values
Number range ( .. ) The number range operator enables the retrieval of results containing numerical values within a specified range. input two numbers devoid of spaces, separated by two full stops, along with your search terms. Example: Obesity prevalence adolescents 2010..2020
7. Combinations of operators:
You can combine many of the search operators OR, AND, ” ” Example: (“mental health” OR “emotional well-being”) AND (“youth” OR “adolescents”) -stigma.
8. Punctuation and Capitalisation Don’t Impact Google Search
- Google mostly disregards punctuation marks such as – ! ? @ # when processing search queries. Whether you type words in ALL CAPS or all lowercase also doesn’t change how Google interprets the search terms submitted.
- However, hyphens connecting words together are recognized distinctly. For example, if you search for “data-driven decision”, Google will also return results for “data driven decision”, “data driven decisions” or just “data driven” in its results – recognising the conjoined overall concept despite exact wording variations authors may use.
9. Other useful tools
verbatim – will return results for the exact search term or phrase you have requested and will not include synonyms. You can find this under tools – all results – verbatim.
Google Advanced search also provides search options that are not available as special search operators such as filter by language or usage rights (filter by Creative Commons) https://www.google.com/advanced_search
Create an alert: You have the option to receive email notifications whenever there are new results for a particular topic in Google Search. This feature allows you to stay updated on news or product information or even your name. Google Alerts
10. Google Specialised Search
- Google Scholar: dedicated to finding scholarly research
- Google Data Sets: Using a simple keyword search, users can discover datasets hosted in thousands of repositories across the Web
- Google News: is a content portal as well as a search engine. When you go to the front page of Google News, it resembles a newspaper stitched together from a large number of different newspapers. However, Google News also contains information from blogs and other less traditional media sources.
- Google Books: Google Books is a search engine for finding information in print books
- Google Lens: not sure how to describe what you see, use your camera or an image to search instead.
- Google Translate: will translate from images, documents or up to 5000 words from text
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