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Mathematics: Search tips

Searching Google

Default Search Settings or How Google Interprets your Query:

Implicit AND

Google returns pages that match all your search terms with the term Search terms are automatically combined using AND  

Exact Matching

Google returns pages that match your search terms exactly  

Word Variations

Google returns pages that match variants of your search terms. This means that it will automatically look for correct spelling of misspelled words  

Common-Word Exclusion

Google ignores some common words called “stop words,” the, on, where, how

32-Word Limit

Search queries limited to 32 words  

Not case sensitive

Capital letters of search terms are ignored  

Search

Searches documents by keyword  

Word order

Google gives more priority to pages that have search terms in the same order as the query  

Ignoring Punctuation

Google ignores most punctuation and special characters including . ; ? [ ] ( ) @ / * < >

Truncation

Automatic – no additional symbols required to search for alternative word endings  

Search results

Displays by relevance attributed to Google’s algorithm  

Compound words

Searches both the compound word and the with a space between the words airline air line

Options to Refine your Search; Crafting Queries with Special Characters, Operators and Symbols:

“phrase searching”

Use quotations marks around phrases “birds eye”

OR and |

Interchangeable use of OR or |. Results include either search term. OR must be capital letters tourism OR travel

-

Exclude use –immediately before a search term you want to exclude wine -barrel

..

Specify the results contain numbers in a range 1800..2000

*

Use *, an asterisk character, known as a wildcard, to match one or more words in a phrase (enclosed in quotes) “Google * my life”

synonyms

Use ~(the tilde symbol) immediately before a search term to include synonyms ~tourism

intitle:

Finds results with your search term in the document title intitle:tourism

allintitle:

Finds results with your search terms in the document title allintitle:confidential

inurl:

Finds results with your search term in the URL inurl:healthy

allinurl:

Finds results with your search terms in the URL allinurl:google.faq

Info:

Finds results about the web page Info:library.wlu.ca

related:

Finds results with content related to a specific website

related: http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/

filetype:

Limits your search results to a specific file type. Examples of file types include; doc xls ppt mp4 filetype:pdf

site:

Limits your search to searching within a specific site site:www.library.wlu.ca

link:

Use to see what sites link to a specific website link:www.library.wlu.ca

define:

Find definitions sourced from a range of online resources define:tourist

cache:

See what a cached version of the site looked like. The last time that Google crawled the site

Cache: https://wlu.ca

AROUND(n)

Proximity search based on the number n. AROUND has to be capitalized CBC AROUND(20) Harper

$

Find prices Nexus $

#

Find popular hashtags for trending topics #leftoverturkey

_

Connect two works. Your search results will find this pair of works linked together or connected with underscore dog_house

Movie:

Include movie: to find movie-related information Movie:blade runner

Phonebook:

Reverse lookup using Google Phonebook:555-555-1212