As librarians, we use and teach students to employ Google Search hacks all the time to make searching more efficient and strategic. For those of you mathematically minded, they are called Boolean Search Strategies, allowing us to combine keywords with operators (or modifiers) to produce more relevant results. Try a few of them out for yourselves and see what a difference it makes.
1. Use quotations for exact wording
Google doesn't necessarily search in the order of the keywords typed into a search.
2. Use "OR" to get more options
A great example is searching climate change. Because terminology has evolved, salient information might also be under global warming. A search would look like this ["climate change" OR "global warming"]. Be sure to capitalize OR.
3. Use a -minus symbol (or -hyphen) to remove options
This is useful when your keyword has multiple meanings. For example, [jaguar -car]
4.Use "site:" to limit your search within one website
This is very helpful on websites that might not have good search functionality. Searching for the electoral college on a site like the NY Times would look like this [site:www.nytimes.com "electoral college"]
5. Use "site:" and a country code to search within a specific country
Google's search algorithm uses geographic location as a part of its formula. Expand your search to a particular country for a number of reasons, like to broaden perspectives and viewpoints. Here is a list of country codes. For example, what is being said about American politics in Russia? [site:RU Trump]
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