Google is by most accounts the best search engine in the World. Since its founding in 1998, Google has virtually synonymous with the word search. No one has to ask what you mean when you ask “Did you Google it?” Google rose in popularity because the engine returned highly relevant search results and presented them in a useful and understandable way. Google does its job so well however, that it is easy to become complacent and just let Google do all the work. Don’t stop there!
Most people enter a word or phrase into Google and scan the hits that come up, rarely getting past the first page of Ads and search results. You can do a lot more to streamline your search results.
Filter your search results by date:
Select Tools from beneath the right hand corner of the search bar.
Click the dropdown labeled “Anytime” and you can select a time frame or enter a custom date range.
This will limit the search results to pages published in the time frame selected. This can be very helpful when researching older articles that are contemporary to past events, or for limiting to recent articles. Once you have limited your results by date, you can sort the results by date too.
Narrow Your Searches with Google Advanced Search:
For some reason Google decided to hide Advanced Search, but to access it, enter the URL: https://www.google.com/advanced_search . This presents a menu allowing you to run very precise searches. You can easily search for Web pages that contain:
All searched words
An exact word or phrase
Any of the searched words
None of the searched words
A number range
Then you can narrow your search by:
Language
Region
Last Update Range (like the filter above)
A specific site or domain
Where the terms appear in the page (title/text/URL/Links)
Filtering out explicit content
File Type
Usage Rights
You can perform all of the above in the standard Google search box if you learn the proper syntax. For Example:
Limit a search to a specific site such as: site:nytimes.com
Search Social media by inserting an @ in front of a term: @tires
Exclude a word from your search by putting a – in front of it: car wheels –steering
Search an exact phrase by enclosing it in quotes: “fastest animal”
Combine searches using OR between terms: cats OR dogs
