Googling is a reliable method to find quality resources but only when you know exactly what you’re looking for! It’s easy to get overwhelmed at the millions of results that appear with every search. By employing the three tips below, you can save yourself both time and frustration.
If you use quotation marks around your entry, Google will search for that exact order of words, allowing Google to search for your entry as one whole phrase instead of individual words. For example, if you’re looking for the title of a song but can only remember one or two lyric lines, putting them in quotation marks will increase your chances of finding the song name. This tip also works well for error codes and article titles.
If you want to search on a specific website but it doesn’t have a good search feature already embedded, use site: when searching on Google. For example, if you want to find articles about tsunamis on the Washington Post website, you could Google site:washingtonpost.com tsunamis.
If you get lots of results unrelated to what you’re actually searching for, use a hyphen to eliminate topics from your list of results. For example, if you’re researching cranes the animal, searching cranes -construction will show you more feathered birds than metal machines.