One of the largest hurdles of using Google is the amount you must weed through. Some searches result in thousands of pages; who has time to go through all that? You don't need to. Did you know you can manipulate a regular Google search with a couple hacks to your search? Its true! Try these search hacks during your next google search.
- site:XXXXX This search tells google to limit your search to a particular site or domain. For instance, if you limit to site:berkeley.edu you would only search the Berkeley site. Similarly site:.gov would search only sites ending in .gov, and site:.edu would search only sites ending in .edu.
- -XXXXX Adding a minus/hyphen sign "-" to a term will remove results with that term. This can be very helpfull when removing common words associated with your topic.
- filetype:XXXX Using filetype: will only find certain file extentions (.doc, .pdf, .ppt, etc)
- "XXX XXXX" Putting double quotes around a phrase will find only that phrase.
You can also combine some of these search hacks, such as adding -site:nytimes.com to remove results from the New York Times website. More search tricks can be found in the Library's Google Search Guide
