Skip to Main Content
Before you search...
- Determine your topic or what information you are looking for
- Choose as many descriptive search terms or keywords as you can
- Developing a list of keywords is a good practice for any research project.
- Too few words may give poor results
- Select nouns and avoid words ignored by search engines, also called stop words
- Explore your Search Settings to set your Google preferences
- Setting a safe search filter, number of results per page, view or edit your search history
- Learn to use the Google Toolbar to set up personal settings like bookmarks for your favorite pages
Google search conventions...
- Google ignores most punctuation and symbols except:
- Dollar sign when used to indicate price
- Fiat car $500 gives different results than Fiat car 500
- Hyphen when used to connect words.
- Symbols used to convey meaning
- programming languages :C++
- musical terms: G#
- Symbols used in social media
- Use hanshtags (#) in front of a word: #throwbackthursday
- Use at symbols (@) in front of a word: @twitter
- Searches are not case sensitive
- Keywords or search terms can be entered in lower or UPPER case or a coMBinatiON
- Exception: Boolean operator OR must be in all caps
- Learn more about Boolean operators
- Example: To find tacos in multiple cities search:
- Word order matters
- Google ranks the first word slightly higher than the second, the second slightly more than the third, etc.
- Google uses automatic word stemming
- Google searches for all possible word variations
- Diet returns results for diets dieting dietary
