Mary Ellen Bates - Tip of the Month

January 2005: Googling Better
While I often remind people in my workshops that Google is not necessarily the most appropriate search tool, most of us do use Google in the course of our research day.

The following are a few of the techniques and tools I use to make my Google searching more effective or more productive.
Synonym Searching

Google has a limit of 10 words per search, which can make it difficult to include all the possible variations on a word. For example, a search for reports on childhood obesity should probably also include the words child, children, kid, kids, youth and family as well as childhood, and the words obese, overweight and fat as well as obesity. Oops! That adds up to 11 possible search terms, and doesn't give you any leeway to include filetype: limitations or other words to narrow the search down to reports. One way to circumvent this limitation is to try Google's synonym search. Add a tilde (~) at the beginning of the words child and obese (~child ~obese), and Google retrieves web sites that use any of those synonyms. "