Google Search Tips

I was recently doing some searching on Google, and was having some problems finding what I was looking for. In the following I will highlight some of the more useful search operators that can be used when searching on Google to help find what you need faster.

One way to narrow your search is using the advanced search feature on Google. You can get there by clicking on “advanced search” right next to the search text box. This gives you many ways to perform you search without memorizing search operators.

The following are some of the search operators that I use most when searching on Google. I find this to be quicker than using the “advanced search”. Click on the links below to see the differences in the searches.

” “
Using quotes forces Google to search for the exact phrase inside them. For example, water in the boat, and “water in the boat” return very different results. In a normal search Google removes common words like “in”, “I”, and “the”. Using quotes is one way to force Google to include those words in your search.

+
This is another way to force words to be included in your search. Your search could be something like water +in +the boat which returns a different result than above.

-
Use this to remove a word from your search. -water +in +the boat

*
This one I use a lot, this is a “wild card”, which will try any word in place of the *. “water in the *”

~
Add this to your search to include synonyms to. Searching for ~large boat will return results that include big in place of large.

site:
If you want to limit your search to a particular website, you can enter your search term followed by site:(URL). For example boat site:mnsu.edu

This is a short list of the search operators I use most. Check out the following links for more:
Google Cheat Sheet
Google Web Search Features