This is particularly the case when it comes to searching Google. I have assumed that all students recognise the dangers of using Google for academic quality, especially when researching a topic covering a broad field. But so often I have seen students typing freely into the search box, hoping for the best when they press enter.

There are so many clever ways of making your searches concise, many of which would be too time consuming to mention. Here are some highlights:

Placing your search phrase in “quotation marks”. By doing that you can make sure that your search only returns results that have the exact phrase, side by side within a web document.

Here I am using Google to search for webpages containing the phrase “Star wars”, as long as they don’t contain any mention of “jar jar binks”. This is represented by the – before the phrase.

Here I have asked Google to return results relating to Star wars, but only where ‘Star Wars’ is mentioned in the website address or ‘URL’.

This search is similar to the URL search, but instead asks for results where the search term is in the title of the web document, not the address. You can find the title of a webpage written at the top of your browser window, at the furthest point.

For more tips (there are so many!) on using Google refer to Google help or their trusty ‘Cheat sheet‘.