Background

As a search engine, Google provides all kinds of results to your search query as long as it thinks it is relevant, sometimes too broad. This section teaches you some tricks to limit your search results, making the search process more efficient.

Tricks while searching

Specific website (insite:)

To narrow down search results to one source, you can add “insite:XXX.com” to the search query. For example, if you want to search for “C. elegans” related resources only from NCBI’s website, you can add “insite:ncbi.nlm.nih.gov” in the search query.

Exact keyword (“”)

Sometimes google will show you results with similar keywords. To specify a exact keyword, you can add double quotation marks(“x”)around the keyword.

Exclude term (-)

To exclude a specific term from the search results, you can add “-” with the term that you want to exclude.

For example, the first result of “Banana” is from Wikipedia. Let’s say you don’t want to see anything from Wikipedia, you can search for “Banana -wikipedia”.

Specify file type (filetype:)

To specify the file type of the search result, you may add “filetype:xxx” to the query.

For example, to limit results to only PDF files related to iGEM, you can search for “iGEM filetype:PDF”.

Within a time range (xxxx..xxxx)

To restrict results within a specific time range, you can add “FROM..TO” in the search query. For example, to search for “Deduction of uric acid concentration” related resources published within 2015 to 2018, you can add “2015..2018” in the search query.