Reference Books Online
Google Power Searching
Clicking on the "Tools" button from your search results will activate 2 new options that allow you to set a time range to search (e.g. the past 24 hours, or 2012-2016) or enable "verbatim" results, which turns off Google's customizations based on your location, search history, etc.
Advanced Search Commands
Operator | Function |
"" | Enclose words in quotation marks to find them only when they appear together in that order. For example, searching "my cat" will find I love my cat but not I love my dog and cat. |
* (asterisk) | The wildcard operator stands in for an undefined word. For example, searching "worst * ever" will find worst episode ever and worst movie ever. |
- (minus sign) | Adding this to the front of a word will exclude results with that word. For example, searching goalie -hockey will find pages about goalies but not ones that mention hockey. |
site: | Allows you to search Google's index for a particular website. For example, searching site:wooster.edu library will find pages about the library on Wooster's website. You can combine this with the wildcard to search on a top-level domain. For example, searching site:*.gov will limit your results to government websites and site:*.edu will limit your results to academic sites. |
AROUND(n) | Use term1 AROUND(n) term2 to find pages where the two terms appear within n words of one another. For example, searching cat AROUND(3) dog will find pages where the words "cat" and "dog" appear with up to 3 words in between them. |