Women's and Gender Studies: Search Tips

Video: Finding Quality Sources with Google Scholar

Video: Find Articles through the PCC Library

Advanced Google Searching

Advanced Google Searching

Search specific phrases by putting a whole phrase in quotation marks. For example, if you were researching the food company United Natural Foods, you could put "United Natural Foods" in quotations to make sure you only get articles that have those three words together as a phrase.

Add a plus sign (+) to the words you MUST have in your results and a minus sign (-) to words you DO NOT want in your results. For example, if you want to search for information about Jaguar the car company but you don't want results about jaguars, the cats, your search can look like:

               jaguar -cat +car

You can look for resources only on certain types of websites, like Educational (.edu) or Government (.gov).

To do this, add site:edu or site:gov to your regular Google search.

For example: 

  • If you do an ordinary Google search for nutritional supplements, most of your top results will be commercial (.com) sites trying to sell you vitamins.
  • If you search for nutritional supplements site:gov , the top results (except for the sponsored ads) will be sites such as the National Institute of Health and the Food and Drug Administration, which are authoritative, unbiased sources that are not trying to sell you anything.
  • If you search for nutritional supplements site:edu, your top results will be from universities providing research on nutritional supplements

You can use this same trick for searching a website. So say for example you were looking on the Oregon state website for information about grants for small businesses. You could search: 

       site:https://www.oregon.gov/ small business grants

Learn more Google Search tips from "6 Google Tricks That Will Turn You Into an Internet Detective" in the New York Times.