Tips Examples
Be specific:
 • Use nouns and unique words
 • Put the most important words first
 • Use multiple terms when possible

If you were interested in "how to treat diabetes" you could search for:

diabetes treatment medication

Note: AND is automatically added between terms in google

Use quotes around phrases so the search engine will search for the words as a phrase not as separate words To look for a term, rather than search the individual words in a term, use quotes around it:
"world health organization"

Limit to a particular domain type:

.edu, .org, .gov, etc.

Use: 'site:'
"health care" site:.edu
"global warming" site:.org

education site:.gov

Use a minus sign - in front of a word to exclude its search If you wanted pages on lung disease but not including cancer you can prevent "cancer" from being searched:
"lung disease" -cancer
Limit your search to words in the titles of sites. If your terms are in the title (rather than appearing anywhere on the site) there is a better chance it is a major subject of the site

Use: 'allintitle:'

allintitle: health care

allintitle: global warming
Use parentheses around terms that have similar meanings. Enter connectors in capital letters Crime AND (adolescents OR teenagers)
Look for an 'Advanced Search' option for each search engine you use. Use other limiters such as date, file type, etc.
Note: web search engines do not support truncation! In other words, '*' and '?' don't work