This post offers a few tips on how to make Google searches more effective.
As an author of research papers, you are a producer of information but, more often, when you build your research on what has been done before, you are a consumer of information. This is why it is useful to know how to search for information more efficiently. These days, searching for information usually means ‘googling’ (a verb now recognized by the Oxford dictionaries), and you may find the following tips useful in making your searchers more precise.
1. Add the symbol * between search terms: When a pair of terms that you are looking for may be separated by a few words, typing an asterisk between them tells the search engine to include pages in which the two terms have 1–5 words between them. For example, if you are looking for the words ‘renewable energy’, typing ‘renewable * energy’ will retrieve pages that contain any of the following phrases: ‘renewable sources of energy‘, ‘renewable and sustainable energy’, and ‘renewable and non-conventional energy’.
2. Use versions of Google other than what is default for your country: Google is known to customize search results, and one approach to customization is to consider the country from which a search is being made. For example, if you are in India, the default is Google.in; if in Britain, the default is Google.uk; in France, Google.fr; and so on. However, you can change the default by typing the alternative web address: typing Google.com makes for a more international search.
3. Use ‘verbatim’ search: Google is known to ‘extend its brief’, as it were. For example, Google automatically includes synonyms of the terms you have typed in the search box. The search results are also influenced by such extraneous considerations as the websites you may have visited, the contents of Gmail, and the device being used for the search. However, if you wish these factors to be ignored, click ‘All results’ and choose ‘verbatim’ from the drop-down list.
4. Repeat a term and change the sequence of terms: If the search results are not satisfactory, repeating a term more than once in the search box often works by bringing in more relevant results, as does typing them in a different sequence. For instance, if ’adverse effects climate change’ fails to bring in satisfactory results, try ‘climate change adverse effects climate’.
In general, if you spend a good deal of time searching, these two resources are well worth a visit:
Karen Blakeman’s blog at www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/
Google at www.google.com/insidesearch
