Google search tips

The “site:” operator
If you want your search results to come from a specific website you can achieve this by using the (“site”) operator. For example, the search [london site:guardian.co.uk] will return pages about London but only from the guardian.co.uk website. Similarly, you can also specify a whole class of sites, for example [london site:.ac] will return results only from a “.ac” domain and [london site:.uk] will return results only from UK sites.

The “OR” operator
If you’re researching a topic but are unsure which keywords will return the information you need, you
can use the (“OR”) operator. Note that “OR” must be typed in capital letters. For example, [university of london international programmes 2009 OR 2010] will give you results about either one of these years. Note that search is always case insensitive: searching for [university of london] is the same as searching for [University of London].

Excluding specific terms
You can narrow your searches using the (-) operator. Putting a minus sign immediately before a word, making sure there’s no gap between the minus sign and the word, ensures that pages containing that word won’t appear in your results. For example, if you’re looking for information about the credit crunch but don’t want anything about globalisation, you could try: “credit crunch” -globalisation

Searching for specific document types
You can search for specific types of files using the “filetype:” operator. For example, if you’re looking for PDF files about climate change, you could try: climate change filetype:pdf

Searching within numerical ranges
Using the .. operator allows you to search within defined dates. For example, if you’re looking for information about the Roman Empire in the third century, you could use this search: roman empire 200..300

Using the (*) wildcard
If you search using (*) within a query, the asterisk acts as a placeholder for any unknown term(s) and finds the best matches. For example, the search [Einstein’s papers on * theory] will return pages about Einstein’s theoretical writings. 

Search by image
You can now use an image instead of words to start your Google search. . .. popoipoipokjlWatch this YouTube clip to see how it's done.