NARRATOR: Welcome to Optimizing Your Google Search. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to focus your search to get the best results effectively and efficiently.
First, I'll give a quick overview of basic searching techniques. Use quotation marks around phrases so that Google searches for the phrase, not the individual words. Use Boolean operators - AND, OR, NOT - to combine terms. Here, I've used OR to search for all of these terms. Here, I've used NOT to take avian flu out of my search. The AND is assumed between the other phrases. Use parentheses to group terms that should be searched together.
To do a more complicated search, you can use Google's Advanced Search page, where you can combine terms and look for specific sites or file types. But you can also use shortcuts and do a complicated search right from Google's main search box. I've used an asterisk to retrieve Transplant, transplants, and transplantation. I've used a tilde before organ to retrieve synonyms, such as heart, kidney, and liver, in addition to organ. I've used a minus sign here to take "music" out of the search.
Here's a search that puts it all together. I'm looking for information on brain death in Japan including info on the Japan Organ Transplant Network, from 1990-2000, so I entered brain death in quotes, then Japan* to include sites with related words, such as Japanese, and dots between 1990 and 2000 to search for info within that date range.
But there's more that I can do to focus my search. Using operators will let me make my search even more specific. Here, I've searched for the CDC web site. To look for specific info within the site, I'll add ~guidelines mrsa to find information on guidelines and related words and MRSA infections.
To find info on diabetes in children on sites with the word diabetes in the URL, I'll search using these terms. To find specific types of files, for example, PowerPoints, I just enter the concept I want and filetype: ppt.
If you'd like more help searching Google, please contact the Taubman Health Sciences Library.