Chapter 2. Focusing Your Web Search
Track packages, define words and find specialized information
Learn to perform Special queries on cached pages or similar pages
Search Google News, Google Groups, and Froogle
Focus your search using the Advanced Search
Narrow your search by finding results in a previous search
Most of the time, the simple Google search helps you find the Web content you need. There will be other occasions, however, where your search is too broad and you need to narrow, or focus, your search. Focusing your search results in fewer matches, hopefully limiting the number of Web pages you need to explore in order to arrive at just the right information. Focusing your search can be accomplished using search operators—special Google commands that tell the search engine how to limit the search—using the Google Advanced Search, and using topic-specific searches. You can also search within your results, further narrowing the results.
Search Operators
Search operators are special words and symbols, sometimes followed by a colon, which when accompanying search terms, instruct the Google search engine how to focus the search.
In most cases, Google search operators, like Google search terms, are not case sensitive. In other words, the search term pumpernickel and PuMperNickEl return the same results. There are a few exceptions, and this chapter notes when search operators are case sensitive.
When terms are absolutely required in the ...
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