Basic Search Operators
Exact phrase search - Use inverted commas around your search term:
Eg “Climate Change”.
What does this do?: Finds the exact phrase, not the individual words. Gets less articles, but more precise
Similar terms - Use the "~" symbol to return similar terms.
Eg ~plane
What does this do?: Searches for terms with similiar meaning, in this case - aircraft, flight, jet, etc.
OR - Put Or between you key words
Eg "Employment law" OR "labour law"
What does this do?: Wider search - looks for articles that have either one phrase in them or the other. Search for one word or another, will give you larger amount of articles.
AND -Google defaults to an AND search so it isn't usually necessary to include the term AND in your searches.
- (Minus sign - acts as NOT) Put the minus sign before the word you want to exclude
Use the minus sign if you want to exclude a word,
eg. "law reform commission" –victoria
eg. Carlton - AFL
What does this do?: Gets rid of irrelevant hits, makes articles retrieved less, but more on topic
Wildcard - The "*" symbol is a wildcard. This is useful if you're trying to find a phrase, but don't know a particular term in that phrase.
Eg Senate voted against the * bill.
What does this do?: If you include * within a query, it tells Google to try to treat the star as a placeholder for any unknown terms. It then tries to find the best matches. So in the example it would find Senate voted against the crime bill or Senate voted against the new bill.
Search web pages with a specific domain extension - Type Site: and then the sector domain
Eg site:edu
What does this do?:Search within certain types of web site, by sector domain. You can use this to search by domain within education sector (.edu) websites, or any of the Government (.gov), information (.info) commercial (.com) or any other sector websites. Just type site and a semi colon, and then the domain country code
See Advanced search or GoogleGuide reference sheet for more features.
