Google Search Basics

Happy New Year!

I'm always surprised by what I don't know, and what other people don't know.

While training a beginning researcher (of the "Congratulations you are now a researcher" variety) I discovered that she didn't know search basics, like how to create an exact phrase search in Google, so I dug up the Google Basic Search Help Page

From the basic search page, I learned that Google is now automatically stemming searches! This is not particularly good for researchers, as it also stems on names now.

UPDATE TO ADD: After a little more research I found that putting a word in quotes or adding a + before a word will turn off stemming for a particular word.

From the Google Advanced Search Help Page I found out about the Google Synonym Search. If you want to search not only for your search term but also for its synonyms, place the tilde sign ("~") immediately in front of your search term.

For example I searched for "Bill Gates" ~philanthropy and Google also substituted the word charity, foundation, and community for philanthropy.

It isn't perfect, but it may make general internet searching a little quicker.