LANGUAGE CENTER - STANFORD UNIVERSITY

As a Tool for Academic Writing

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Google Basics 2

This section covers additional techniques for searching.

EXCLUDING TERMS

What happens when you want to exclude a word or phrase from your search? Use the minus sign (-) indicator in front of the search term. Suppose you want to find examples how to use "presidency" but you don't want examples of "the presidency". Put presidency -"the presidency" into the Google search box and you'll get only pages without "the presidency".

ADVANCED SEARCH

Click on "advanced search" The advanced search form lets you set a lot of search conditions at one time (though it isn't as flexible as the search box on the main page).

Under "Find results", you can look for pages with all of the words in the box, with an exact phrase (the same as using double quotes), with at least one of the words in the box (the same as using OR), or without the indicated words (the same as using the minus sign.

Here are some other useful advanced search options

• Language - you can set this to only return pages written in English, or any other language
• File format - you can limit your search to pdf's, PowerPoints, etc.
• Date - you can limit your search to certain dates, especially recent ones
• Occurrences - you can look for terms that only occur in titles, in the main text, etc.
• Domain - you can limit your search to ".edu" sites for instance

Other options such as the number of results returned, safe search, find similar, are also available on the advanced search page--I encourage you to play around with these. We will be referring to some of them in later sections.

PREFERENCES

From the main page you can also click on "Preferences". This allows you to set the standard options for the browser you are using (it's probably better not to change these if it's a shared computer). Some of these are similar to what you find on the advanced search pages, only the computer remembers your choices and keeps them until you change them again.

There are several options here but two are particularly useful for our purposes. Under "number of results" you can increase the number loaded onto a page at one time rather than being limited to 10. I find 20 or 30 works better for me and allows me to skim through material more effectively (you can go up to 100). The second option I like is to open the search results in another window, so that when you click on a link your old results are still up there. If you do this, though, it's a good idea to close windows regularly, and not have the window taking up the whole screen so that you can't see what's behind it easily.