Google Search Tips: How to Get Better (and Faster!) Results
How can we tame the “beast” that is Google and get it to work for us? Here are some quick Google search tips to help:
1. Keep your search terms simple and use only the main words. For example, if you are looking for information on asthma in children who live in New York City, enter: asthma children NYC
2. If you are looking for specific approaches, add more terms: asthma diet supplements relaxation yoga
3. Use relevant synonyms if you’re not finding what you need. For example: asthma herbs “herbal medicine” supplements vitamins
4. If you are searching a phrase, put it in quotes. For example, “ear acupuncture” (in quotes) will return 268,000 results, narrowed down from 2,360,000 results if you had typed ear acupuncture without quotes.
5. You can limit your searches to educational sites, government sites or organizational sites to help find more credible information by typing the word “site” followed by a colon and then .edu, .gov or .org, respectively, after your search terms. For example, to look up information about using biofeedback to treat migraine:
• for educational sites, type biofeedback migraine site:.edu
• for government sites, type biofeedback migraine site:.gov
• for organizational sites, type biofeedback migraine site:.orgOr, to include all these sites (.edu, .gov and .org) but to eliminate commercial sites, you can just type a minus sign before “site:.com.” For example: anxiety meditation –site:.com
6. To ensure the websites you retrieve are focused on your area of interest, you can require the search word to appear in the site title by typing “Intitle:” before your search word. For example, Intitle:fibromyalgia will yield 916,000 results, versus 15,600,000 results if you had just typed fibromyalgia.
http://healthbytesnyc.com/popular/google-search-tips-get-better-faster-results/