Google search tips

These are my favourite tips after attending a training session by Karen Blakeman, RBA http://www.rba.co.uk/

Did you know that the search results which appear on my computer will not be the same as those displayed on yours?

Personalisation

This is because Google uses personalisation.  It uses your internet search history (sites you have used before) and information from social media and other accounts you may be signed into to create a user profile and target your results.

This is not necessarily a bad thing; it may help you find what you want more quickly and avoid lots of irrelevant results.  But if you want to retrieve completely non-personalised results, eg. for a literature review, or for a topic or approach to a topic which you do not usually search for, you will need to use another browser.  You could keep this as a completely “clean” browser where you delete all cookies and internet history and stay logged off any other sites where Google could link any personal data to the browser.

Google settings

The cog wheel on the right hand side of home page (or from search results page, depending upon browser) allows you to alter your search settings for Google.  It may be an idea to increase the number of search results displayed on the first page; you may want to turn off the instant predictions (guessing what you want befoer you finish typing) and I find it helpful to have the results link I select always appear in a new tab, so that the main results page stays open.

AND searches

Google does not search for ALL the search terms you have entered, even if it says it does.

Left hand search bar

Ever notice this?  I hadn’t.

The left hand menu bar provides all sort of search options, such as narrowing the search by dates, by type of resource, pages from the UK, and, my favourite, Verbatim.   This does search for ALL the search terms you have entered.  It won’t work in combination with the other filters though, but there are ways round this. 

Search commands

There are set search commands or operators you can use to conduct precise searches, for example search for specific type of information eg. statistics, reports, or search titles only.

Where has Google Advanced Search gone?

Now hidden with Google settings. Click on the cog wheel on the right hand side.

Google.com

By default Google will display the local version of the search engine ie Google.co.uk.  Google is very good at localising, but if you want to avoid this emphasis use Google.com or the local version for the country you are interested in.  You need to guess the address eg. Google.fr for France or Google.nl for Netherlands.  If in doubt, google “google france”!

Google scholar

A useful place to start to search for a specific paper, but be wary.....Google does not use the publishers' meta data ie. it does not search the author field or date field. So not comprehensive or reliable.