Finding resources: Google searching

We are all familiar with searching the internet using the search engine Google. These hints and tips will help you focus your searches to save you time and find better results from a Google search.

Google offers an advanced searching screen with predefined options to help you search the internet more effectively and produce a smaller results list. The predefined options include searching for specific phrases, by geographical area, where your terms appear in a web page and by date. Depending on your research task and/or confidence in creating your own search, you may find the advanced search screen helpful.

If you have a very specific research task to complete and/or you feel confident creating your own search, you may find the following advanced Google search operators useful.

You can review our basic and advanced searching for academic sources guidance to help you create your own search within Google. (Truncation may not work in Google.)

Using the predefined options in the Advanced search will help you to compose a more detailed and focused search. Go to the Settings menu in the bottom right corner of a Google page to access the Advanced search screen.

To search for any kind of number range such as years, distances, prices etc., separate the two values in your search by two full stops (no spaces). For example type 25..30 kg to find articles containing the weigh range 25-30 kg or type 2021..2022 to find articles from the years 2021 or 2022.

You can also limit your search to after or before a specific date with after: or before: followed by the date. The date format is YYYY-MM-DD. For example, after:2020/12/31 before:2022/01/01

You can ask Google to search individual websites or groups of websites sharing a domain. To do this, type site: followed by the web address or domain without any spaces. For example:

• site:bbc.co.uk would search the BBC website
• site:gov.uk would search UK government websites
• site:ac.uk would search UK university websites

Google can search for documents that are available online based on their file format. To do this, type filetype: followed by the file format with no spaces. For example:

• filetype:pdf will search for PDF documents
• filetype:ppt will search for PowerPoint presentations
• filetype:doc will search for Word documents
• filetype:xls will search for Excel spreadsheets

Note that newer documents created in Microsoft Office often have an 'x' on the end (e.g. docx instead of doc). You will need to search for these separately.

You can combine this with domain searching. For example, search site:gov.uk filetype:pdf to find UK government reports.

Search terms can be excluded from appearing in items in the results list in Google by using a hyphen - with no spaces before the unwanted search term. For example:

• Jaguar -car will return items about jaguar the animal, but not Jaguar the car manufacturer in the results list.
• Nail -finger will return items about nails used in construction, but not finger nails in the results list.

Search terms can be found only in the title of a document or webpage by Google. To do this, type allintitle: followed by your search term(s) with no spaces. For example: 

• allintitle:metabolism
• allintitle:unfair dismissal
• allintitle:climate change