Focused research requires users to delimit, or provide selection criteria, for the database or engine so that it knows what you are really seeking. Here are a few key ways to delimit your search.
Quotations (“ “): Anything put in quotation marks Google will search for that exact phrase. If you run a search for climate change with no limits, you get over 700 million results, because every page that mentions either climate or change will be populated. However, the simple act of putting “climate change” within quotation marks brings your search to under 300 million. If you search for “Keeling Curve” you get about 75,000. While this is still a lot of results to go through, when you combine delimiters, you will get a much more narrow and focused set of results. This trick is particularly helpful when you have quotes and you’re trying to find the author who said it.
AND: Use AND in all caps to let Google know you want only results that include both of these phrases or items, for example climate change AND Keeling Curve.
Plus and Minus Signs (+ -): These allow you to add or subtract from your search results. For example, let’s say that you are interested in Donald Trump’s reactions to climate change. If you run a search for “climate change” +Trump you will get under 150 million results. But more importantly, notice that the results are now much more focused - President Trump’s policies and how they have affected climate change. If you want to compare and contrast Joe Biden’s policies with Donald Trump’s, then run a search for “climate change” +Trump +Biden and now you have just a few hundred results instead of 700 million. Or, let’s say that you want to filter out results with President Trump. Since the popularization of the phrase “fake news” has been associated with him, you may want to search for examples that do not include any mention of his name. Thus, running a search for “fake news” -trump reduces the numbers by millions of results. If you combine a plus and minus delimiter, such as infodemic -trump +science because you want results that focus on science, you will only get a few thousand results.
Tilde (~): to ensure similar words to your search terms are included in your results, include a tilde in front of those words. For example, if you are worried about missing results because you don’t know if the word science, scientist, or scientific might be used, you can include a tilde in front of the word, and it will search for that word plus similar words. Run a search for “fake news” -Trump ~science brings you results with science and scientist in just the first few links.