Google Power Search

Chapter 1. Refining Your Searches

If your search yields millions of search results, then your search query is too broad. Rather than skim over many pages of search results, use these search refinement tips to provide more focused results:

• Multiple words: Avoid making one-word queries.

• Case insensitivity: There’s no need to capitalize.

• Superfluous words: Drop overly common words.

• Exact phrases: Put quotes around phrases.

• Word order: Arrange your words in the order you think they would appear in the documents you’re looking for.

• Singular versus plural: Use plural if you think the word will appear in that form in the documents you’re looking for.

• Wildcard: * can substitute for a whole word in a multiword search.

• Number range: .. between numbers will match on numbers within that range.

• Punctuation: A hyphenated search word will also yield pages with the un-hyphenated version. Not so with apostrophes.

• Accents: Don’t incorporate accents into search words if you don’t think they’ll appear in the documents you’re looking for.

• Boolean logic: Use OR and - to fine-tune your search.

• Stemming: Google may also match on variations of your search word; to turn this off, use double quotation marks to define an exact word or phrase.

• Synonyms: ~ in front of a word will also match on other words that Google considers to be synonymous or related.

Multiple Words

The first key to refining a search is to use a multiple-word query. A one-word search query isn’t going to give you a targeted a search result. As a simple ...