I consider myself a pretty experienced searcher and I always start on the advanced search page of Google, and suggest others do, too, but Miller provides lots of tips that are applicable to both the simple and advanced search boxes.
For example, in just four pages in the book I learned:
- Capitalization in the search terms does not matter to the Google engine.
- The order you put the words in the search box DOES matter. Google gives the first word more weight than the second, etc., so always lead with the most important word in your search (if you are not using a phrase)
- If you are creating the search yourself, and using Boolean search terms, remember to capitalize OR and NOT and AND so they are not ignored as stop words.
- Google does not allow stemming with a wildcard character, but automatically returns results that include variations of the search terms like plurals and other forms of the word (i.e. educator, educators)
- If you want to limit your hits a bit, you can search just the text that appears on the Web page (and eliminate the search term when appears in the URL or title tag of a page) by typing the word "intext:" in front of your keywords (without the quotation marks.
If you want to become a more proficient searcher, as well as learn how to navigate Blogger, Google Maps, Google Desktop, Google Blog Search, Picasa, and many more of the Google tools, buy this book!
MLA Citation (created by submitting the ISBN number to Ottobib.com, a great site to show your students!)
Miller, Michael. Googlepedia. Indianapolis: Que, 2006.
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Kathy Schrock | Googlepedia | Ottobib
